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Tudor life with Ruth Goodman
00:27:55
Ruth Goodman, presenter of a new HistoryExtra Academy on Tudor life, uncovers what everyday life was really like in 16th-century England
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- [00:02]
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- [02:04]
Podcast Host Rachel Dinning
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine. When we think of the Tudor period, we're all familiar with the kings, the queens, the beheadings. But what about the people who didn't make it into the history books? What did ordinary Tudors eat and drink on a daily basis? For example, how did they keep themselves clean without baths and showers? And what surprising beliefs did they hold about sex, religion and childhood? Well, in this episode, the social historian and broadcaster Ruth Goodman joins Rachel Dinning to discuss what day to day existence was really like for most people in the 16th century. Ruth is the presenter of a new History Extra Academy, exploring this subject in much more detail. Episodes 1 to 3 are out now available in the History Extra app, and if you head to the description of this episode, you can find a link to download the app and start watching now.
- [03:03]
Podcast Host
So welcome Reith to the History Extra podcast. It's great to have you on today. Today we're talking about the Tudors and you've spent so much time living and breathing Tudor history, quite literally in some cases. So my first question I want to ask you, what drew you to this topic of history and looking at ordinary people, not just the big events, not just the monarchs, Looking at ordinary lives in the 16th century, I don't think.
- [03:33]
Ruth Goodman
I ever thought there was anything else, really. I mean, I'm not posh, I'm not rich, I'm not a bloke, I'm not one of the elite. Why would I be interested in them? I wanted to know about people like me in the past, you know, and therefore you want to know about ordinary things like babies, nappies or reading a book, or just like the ordinary details of life and how it would have been to live in the past. I've always wanted to try and get inside the skin of someone, to think those thoughts and to feel those feelings and experience something different. It's time travel, but it's also anthropology and it's self exploration too. It's a sort of multiple journey.
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Podcast Host
And do you think we've underestimated ordinary people's stories in terms of understanding the past?
- [04:23]
Ruth Goodman
Desperately and immediately. It makes sense, doesn't it? Until quite recently, almost all history in a sort of formal sense, tended to be written, produced, analyzed by a very small group of people who were almost exclusively male and elite. And the people that they were interested in were other male elite people, people like them. And that makes absolute sense. But the world has changed and nowadays it's much easier for many of us from all sorts of backgrounds and walks of, to engage with history and to be part of the ongoing story. And so naturally our focus has shifted.
- [05:06]
Podcast Host
Absolutely. And you've written a book on the Tudors, ordinary people in the Tudors, specifically how to be a Tudor. And one thing I'm really curious about is it's quite easy to put together a history of a monarch. There's lots of court records, there's lots of documents about them. But when it comes to ordinary people, how do you start piecing together the story?
- [05:26]
Ruth Goodman
Yeah, well, actually, I think there are quite a lot of records. They're just not necessarily in the places that people are accustomed to looking. You do have to be a bit more open minded about where you're going to look and how you're going to look and be willing to take on things that sometimes step outside the traditional boundaries of history. So archaeology and Objects become very important in a study of ordinary life. And I think too likewise literature, and particularly cheap literature. Not the high end stuff, but the more sort of ordinary, the scurrilous ballads, the joke books, the, you know, the moans and complaints, they become quite important too because they start to give us the sorts of attitudes and ideas that are going on in people's heads. And, you know, if you've got a really scurrilous ballad that's taken the mickey out of people, that gives you so much information about what people are thinking. Like what they think is good, what they think is bad, what they think is funny, what they. It tells you a huge amount that there are sources out there. You just have to be a bit more sort of broad minded in how you get gather them together.
- [06:30]
Podcast Host
And having looked at the 16th century in this way, do you think the Tudors are so very different from us? Where do they differ and where are they similar?
- [06:39]
Ruth Goodman
Well, you know, people are people. I mean, we're all human beings. We are essentially given the same start in life. Our bodies are the same, our brains are the same, but the culture that we live in is utterly different. And that's what makes it so fascinating. They're people like us, but living in a different world. And that world can be different at almost every level. Things you, you utterly take for granted. You think, oh, but everybody does that. Oh, they do it differently. Why do they do it differently? Oh, they see it, they understand it differently. Oh, my goodness. You know, it's, it's that sort of a thing that, yeah, we are all.
- [07:15]
Podcast Host
People, but, oh, the culture that's really set the scene. And one of the reasons that we have you on the podcast today to talk to you, is you've recently recorded a video series for us so you can download the History Extra app to. And it's on what life for ordinary Tudors was like. And to give our podcast listeners a bit of a taste of things to expect, I thought we could go through some of the themes that you discuss in the series. So if we start with leisure and entertainment, we sometimes today picture the Tudors as just an era of hard work. They're just toiling to survive. But actually your series shows that they knew how to enjoy themselves. What kind of things did people in the 16th century do for fun?
- [07:59]
Ruth Goodman
Oh, well, there's so much, isn't there? I mean, you know, they're going to the playhouse, for goodness sake, they're enjoying the bear baiting, they're engaged in all sorts of sports, they're dancing they're playing music, they're writing poetry, they're playing gambling games with cards or dice, they're playing skittles, they're messing about on the street getting drunk. Well, you name it, really.
- [08:27]
Podcast Host
All sorts of things. I mean, of course, this was the era of Shakespeare.
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Ruth Goodman
Exactly. You know, I mean, the theatre was a really vibrant, lively world, and not just in a sort of, you know, formal playhouse. There's also lots of street theater going on. School kids are being encouraged to do their own plays, there's town plays going on. Many cities have their own mystery cycles that happen once a year, like a giant pageant. Stroke fate, stroke amateur dramatics.
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Podcast Host
Fe.
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Ruth Goodman
There's loads, all different sorts.
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Podcast Host
And part of the video series for us. You actually taught me and a few of my colleagues how to dance like a Tudor. Tell us about your love for dancing, firstly, and the history of dance.
- [09:09]
Ruth Goodman
Oh, I love dancing. Anyway, I was lucky enough to do a bit of ballet as a kid and I absolutely adored it. So when I first started getting interested in history, the dance was one of the first things I sort of wanted to know about. I mean, surely they danced. Yeah, surely. Yep. Well, there's loads of evidence to say, yeah, they certainly did, in all sorts of different varieties and ways. And in places, you know, there's posh court dancing, but there's also dancing down the pub. There's loads of records of people dancing at weddings and at celebrations at May Day in particular. Dancing was clearly right throughout society. So then you say, well, what sort of dancing? And that's a real puzzle to try and put together. I mean, there are descriptions of dances, there's pictures of people dancing, and there are indeed dance manuals. But you try. Trying to reconstruct a dance from just the written word is flipping hard. Great fun, though.
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Podcast Host
Great fun. I mean, you described it like, today people might know the Macarena. They know the steps to those kind of things. The Tudors had that, didn't they? They had not necessarily the Macarena, but their routine dances.
- [10:15]
Ruth Goodman
They did, but they had a really sort of wide range. I mean, there's stuff that's super difficult and you'd have to train for years at fine, same as we have, you know, things like ballet these days. But there's also really simple stuff that anybody could just pick up in 10 minutes. There's stuff that's very raucous, there's more stuff that's more sort of sedate and confined. There's stuff where you need to be really young and energetic, and there's stuff where, you know, later on in life you can be a bit more gentle about it. There's a vast array of different sorts of dancing going on that would suit just about anybody.
- [10:49]
Podcast Host
Of course, life wasn't all music and merrymaking and dancing. What about work, life? What sort of jobs were people doing in the Tudor period?
- [10:59]
Ruth Goodman
Well, almost everybody was making a living off the land. I mean, even people who, if you read their sort of like descriptions in an infantry or a will and it says something like carpenter. I mean, yeah, they're making money being a carpenter, but that doesn't mean it's the only thing they're doing. They would probably have had a patch of land as well. Almost all so called jobs, when you've got another job title are in essence part time mixed in and around a small amount of farming. I mean, at least 95% of the population are drawing the majority of their livelihood straight from the land. It's a very, very nature centered world, I suppose. So plowing, I mean, men spent so many hours plowing, I can't tell you. I mean, nowadays we just use plowing in order to open up the ground to put the seed in. That's all plowing is for one particular job. But to a Tudor person, they would plough to do weed control, plough to do drainage, plough to do seed planting, plough to open the land up again at the end of the year. They would plough several times in a year. So that was a major part of many people's lives. And then obviously, you know, every stitch of clothing that anybody's gonna be wearing has to be made entirely by hand. So that involves pretty much the entire female population and quite a number of men in spinning yarn and in making that yarn up into first cloth and then clothing involves a huge proportion of the population. It's sort of hard really in a sense to put your head in that space. Our work tends to be very separate from survival and it tends to be very contained. And that's not how Tudor work was. It was very clearly about staying alive in a very visceral, hands on sort of a way. If you didn't bake your own bread, you didn't pretty much eat it. I mean, yeah, you could buy bread to some degree, but most people are having to do at least some of the processing of that at home. Likewise beer for drinking, clothes for wearing, and on and on it goes. If you want milk or cheese or butter, you've probably got to have a cow. There is a cash economy. Of course, there are things that can be bought and sold, but at the base people are having to be very practical.
- [13:22]
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- [14:57]
Podcast Host
What role did they have in Tudor society?
- [15:00]
Ruth Goodman
Well, obviously they've got to be trained up to be useful. You know, you need a huge range of skills to survive in that society. They're not necessarily the same skills as a modern young person would need. I mean, nobody needed to drive a car in 1600. But they do need to know how to do things such as milk a cow or grow a crop of beans or make a piece of clothing. Those sorts of things were essential skills and kids have to learn. And the best way to learn is by doing so. Kids generally were sort of hauled in to do the sort of ancillary extra jobs, the helping sorts of jobs from quite young ages to sort of, you know, learn by doing. Of course there are schools and there is an interest in society about learning to read and write and do arithmetic. These are useful skills and becoming more so. It's very important for many people spiritually to learn to read. This changes at the time of the Reformation. So when we were all Catholic. It didn't matter quite so much. But when we become Protestant, the idea was that you should have a direct relationship with the word of God. You shouldn't have to be reliant on a priest to tell you what God wants. You should be able to read the Bible for yourself, and that means you have to be able to read. So there's this huge new push right across society, including. People haven't really been interested in whether they could read or write before, but suddenly now there is this new push for people like Plowman and women to learn to read so that you can have this direct relationship spiritually.
- [16:35]
Podcast Host
Wow. So it was a religion that drove literacy.
- [16:37]
Ruth Goodman
Very much so.
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Podcast Host
So obviously, most people know the Tudor period as Henry VIII's era. And during this time, he broke from Rome, he established the new church. How much did this impact on ordinary people? Did they know about it?
- [16:52]
Ruth Goodman
Oh, you knew about it all right. Because every week you went to church and the priest, or later on, whatever you want to call the clergy, as the names change, as the various different brands of religion come and go, that person is being told what to say by his bishop, who is being directly told what to say by the government. So you have a very direct line of communication from the center of power to your village every Sunday. And you're getting regular updates on what you should think, what you should know about. There are messages and it's not just a service when you go to church. I mean, yes, there's a service, but there's also, you know, it's a communication. It's also about notices. And we know this is changing. That is changing. This is a message from the king sort of thing that is coming down to you once a week wherever you are in Britain. So, yeah, people certainly knew about it and it is changing their lives really quite dramatically in some ways. I mean, as we've mentioned, there's this new push for literacy that comes through. Wow. That's a bit of a game changer. But also ideas about what's acceptable and what's not acceptable in your daily life. So we come back to dancing the idea that some points as the religion changes one way and then the other, we get first Henry, who starts off Catholic, then he becomes head of the church. We're technically Protestant, but not very Protestant. Then we go into Edward's reign, we get a lot more Protestant, then we switch back to Mary as well. Catholic for a bit. Then we go on to Elizabeth and we're back in the Protestant flip flop, flip flop, lots of different colors of religion happening. And some of those flavors or colors of religion really do not like you dancing at the pub. They really do not like you playing certain sports. You know, they want to impact on many aspects of your life, not just what we might be called your purely spiritual aspects of your life. So the religion is having a lot of consequences.
- [18:46]
Podcast Host
And it was really a community time, wasn't it? It was like you go to church on Sunday and you're up to date with what's going on in your community.
- [18:52]
Ruth Goodman
You are very much. And it's not just your local community, is it? You're plugging into the national community.
- [18:58]
Podcast Host
Sure. Almost like the news service of the country coming through the church. One thing we haven't talked about yet is Tudor food. And you have a whole episode in your series where you're in a kitchen and you're telling us what they ate and what they drank. What were some of the most common things that people at in the 16th century.
- [19:15]
Ruth Goodman
I mean, bread remains the staple, you know, when we. When we do that Lord's Prayer, give us this day our daily bread. I mean, they mean it. They really mean it. Bread and grain are the basis of what people are eating. And if you couldn't afford bread because you, you know, you have to pay for the miller to grind it, and then. Then it's got to be baked, which either means fuel in your lots of fuel in your own home, or paying a baker cheaper than having your grain turned into bread was to have it turned into something called frumenty, which is a bit like sort of porridge. You don't have to have it milled and you use much less fuel to cook it, and you'll definitely be cooking it at home. So it's a much cheaper version. But again, it's mostly the same grain that would have been turned into bread. It could be wheat, it could be barley, it could be oats, it could be rye. It could be a mix of all of those things in one form or another with whatever else you could get your hands on. Be that vegetables, fruit, milk, honey, meat, fish, whatever you could get. But the sort of the bulk and the fillingness is all coming from the grain.
- [20:20]
Podcast Host
Now, was it tasty, do you think? You've tried your hand at a few Tudor recipes in your time. What does it taste like?
- [20:26]
Ruth Goodman
I really, really like Tudor food. Well, for a start, it's all, you know, real. There's nothing processed about it. It's very fresh, you know, it's very, very fresh. I mean, when you're eating preserved food foods, they're distinctly preserved. You know, it's salted this or smoked that. And most people actually like those flavors. You know, bacon is great, so, so are kippers. You know, these things are flavorful and they're using a huge variety of herbs, much, much bigger than we do nowadays. So it's a varied diet, it's a very fresh diet, it's a very seasonal diet. I like it, I'll be honest.
- [21:05]
Podcast Host
And you actually touched on one of these things in your video series. How did people store their food? They don't have FR back then. How do you keep it fresh for long enough?
- [21:15]
Ruth Goodman
Well, fridges are a bit overrated. Fridges were developed really for the southern states of America where they're very, very useful. But in Britain, our weather doesn't really need a fridge. Most of our weather is relatively cool. But if your food is dry, it doesn't need to be as cold as if it's wet. So the problem with fridges, and one of the reasons they have to be so cold is that they're damp boxes. You get a lot of condensation in them. You're holding the wet in. Bacteria love the wet. So in order to slow the bacteria down, it has to be really cold inside a fridge in order to be able to combat the fact that everything's so damp. Whereas if you use a traditional pantry where there's lots of air flowing through, in a British climate, it's very dry. Well, the bacteria don't like that. So then you don't need it to be as cool to get the same amount of safety. So the traditional sort of pantry storage where you have things or you have your things hung up, perhaps in some sort of open cage so the flies can't get in, but there's loads of airflow flowing, that works really well. Grain does best in sort of big wooden arcs or storage chests. And likewise, meat and fish. Again, as long as you keep the flies off, which you can do either by putting them in a muslin bag or by putting them in some sort of cage. Again, hang them in the air with plenty of airflow. It's surprisingly effective and surprisingly safe. And then, of course, for long term storage, there is the salting and the smoking that we've talked about already.
- [22:44]
Podcast Host
Now, another cliche that some people might have about the Tudors is that they were maybe dirty or smelly. I mean, there's this myth that Queen Elizabeth I never took a bath. I think that might be where it came from.
- [22:56]
Ruth Goodman
Well, that's definitely not true. She definitely did take baths, because she had baths. Her palaces were quite well equipped. Henry had put in bathrooms for himself and she inherited those palaces, but she also used them herself, so. So we know that she did. But of course, having a bath is not the only way to keep clean. It's perfectly possible to keep clean in a variety of different ways, traditionally. Now, I'm sure there were plenty of people in Tudor Britain who were dirty and smelly, just as today. You know, people's standards of hygiene are a varied thing.
- [23:29]
Podcast Host
Absolutely.
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Ruth Goodman
We all have our different quirks and our differences, because yet again, we are all people. But, you know, just because you're not bathing or showering doesn't mean you're not keeping yourself clean. The most important method for Tudors was the changing of underwear, of having linen underwear, not cotton linen. And that is important because the two fabrics behave quite differently when it comes to personal hygiene. Linen is exceedingly absorbent of liquid. It can still feel completely dry when it's actually containing very large proportion of. Of wet. I can't, for the life of me, off the top of my head, remember the figure, but it is big. It's like a third or something. It can take a third of its own volume in something like your sweat, and you won't even feel damp if you then, having worn that linen underwear, and Tudor linen underwear was voluminous, it covered you all over. You take it off, you're taking all that sweat and any grease and dirt with it. You wash that and you put on the clean one. And again, it will absorb everything that comes off your body. You take it off, you put a clean one on, it absorbs everything that comes off your body. You take it off, you put a clean one on, and it does actually work. It's quite amazing. What you find is that the body odour and the smell accumulates in the clothing. So if you don't wash the clothing, oh, you smell really bad. That's the clothing. That's unwashed clothing. It's not about an unwashed body, it's about an unwashed clothing. If you keep changing this linen underwear, you maintain a surprisingly good level of cleanliness. And I know because I've tried.
- [25:04]
Podcast Host
What was that experience like? How long did you try it for?
- [25:07]
Ruth Goodman
Well, I did it for six months. I mean, admittedly, I was living largely outdoors and there was plenty of wood smoke around, so, I mean, it might not have been enough if I was packed inside an office with the windows closed, but for an outdoor life, nobody noticed.
- [25:22]
Podcast Host
And it was Perfectly comfortable.
- [25:23]
Ruth Goodman
It was perfectly comfortable. I remained in very good health.
- [25:26]
Podcast Host
That's so interesting. Now, in the final episode of our series together, you go behind closed doors and we look inside the Tudor bedroom. So I wanted to ask you, what did the Tudors believe about sex?
- [25:39]
Ruth Goodman
Well, I mean, they believed it was important, but fun. They believed that women had more sexual appetite than men. They also believed that you couldn't conceive a child unless both partners were enjoying it, which has a number of ramifications. So there are bits of advice for young men saying that it was important to ensure that your wife has a good time because obviously for the procreation of children, so there's a more godly family were encouraged to ensure that they had good sex. On the downside, if a woman was raped and got pregnant, people said, well, she couldn't have been raped then, could she? So these sorts of beliefs, they're sort of two edged swords in many ways. People also believed at the time that you couldn't get pregnant standing up, a belief that has been remarkably difficult to shift from certain sections of the population. You can get pregnant standing up. However, Tudors didn't believe you could. They thought it was important that if you were wanting to conceive that you should be in the right position, that a woman's body in particular should be in a nice straight line and horizontal. They also thought that for a gentleman, that the testicles produced male sperm on the right hand side and female sperm on the left hand side side. So if you were desperate for a boy, you could always tie a ribbon around your left testicle. It always makes me wonder about Henry's practices. That does.
- [27:00]
Podcast Host Rachel Dinning
That was Ruth Goodman in conversation with Rachel Dinning. Ruth is the presenter of a new History Extra Academy series all about Tudor Life. Episodes 1 to 3 are out now and available in the History Extra app. If you head to the description of this episode, you'll find a link to download the app and start watching now. And if you'd like more content from Ruth, then next month we're giving listeners an opportunity to join her for a virtual live Q and A on 19th November at 7pm GMT. Just head over to historyextra.comtudorlife to find out more.
- [27:48]
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- [27:59]
Ruth Goodman
Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.
- [28:04]
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- [28:06]
Ruth Goodman
Cut the camera. They see us.
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