The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

In a census of the poor in Norwich of 1570 children as young as six, if they had no particular
occupations, were called 'idle'. Children might become the main breadwinners of pauper families.
An Italian observer in about 1500, who charged English parents with want of affection, and with
sending their children away from home at a pathetically early age, was correct, at least in his second
charge. For the poor, there was little choice. In families living in cottages crammed with children,
with too many to a bed and too many mouths to feed, a boy or girl who reached the age of ten or
or twelve left home by necessity to seek work as a servant or labourer. The vulnerability of young
people setting out alone can be imagined, and sometimes proved. In 1517 a man returning from a
pilgrimage to Our Lady at Willesden encountered a young girl by the wayside, seeking honest
service in London. She entrusted herself to the man's protection, but he took her to the Bankside
stews, London's notorious brothels, and engaged the 'maiden' to service with a prostitute.
The girl implored a waterman's wife for 'Our Lady's sake' to save her, and so she did. Others were
less fortunate. Yet most children, sent away from their families to find work, and rarely returning
to them, found new homes of a kind with their masters and mistresses.
The sons of the nobility were also sent away: in the early sixteenth century to be brought up in
another noble household; and a century later, to go to school. Girls of noble and gentry families
went as ladies-in-waiting to other housholds, or might be contracted in marriage very young and
sent to be brought up in the household of their future family. Elizabeth Plumpton was only three
when in 1464 she was contracted to marry John Sotehill, and went to live in the Sotehill household.
When the Italian observer asked why people sent their own children away from home and received
the children of strangers, 'they answered that they did it in order that the children might learn better
manners'. Manners were part of the larger duty to 'reverence, honour and obey' superiors.
When they left home, children were expected to have received the last sacraments of childhood:
penance and the Eucharist. Little children were supposed to attend church - quietly - with their
families, to learn the paternoster (the Lord's Prayer) and Ave Maria (Hail Mary) as soon as they could
talk, and receive the benediction of witnessing the elevation of the Host. Some time between the ages
of seven and fourteen they were judged to have reached the age of spiritual discretion, the age at
which they could tell right from wrong and appreciate the mystery of the Mass. A true understanding
of sin, of penitence, and of salvation was needed before they could confess, be absolved and be
worthy to receive Communion. God knew every sin already. 'You are always in the presence and
sight of God . . . He seeth and is not seen,' as Sir Thomas Wyatt, Henry VIII's courtier and diplomat,
reminded his fifteen-year-old son in 1537. Sorrowful penitence alone would restore the sinner to
God, but only contrite repentance expressed before the priest in confession could restore the sinner
to the body of the faithful. The seven deadly sins - pride, envy, wrath, covetousness, gluttony, sloth,
lechery - all had malign social consequences and were transgressions against the community.
Forgiveness and absolution depended upon tangible restitution for wrongs. The priest was empowered
to impose penitential exercises and pronounce penitents absolved from sin and reconciled to the
community of believers. In the confession, which was secret, the priest should comfort the penitent,
telling him that Christ had died for our sins, reminding him that he was not the first in the world to
sin, and that the greatest sinners had been saved through repentance and calling upon Christ.
Much better to confess sins in this world than to come to universal judgement in the next, 'when no
man of law may speak for us, nor any excuse may serve'; better to perform penance now, in the time
of grace, than in purgatory. The sinner was questioned in detail concerning his failings: of the five
senses; of the seven deadly sins; against the twelve articles of faith in the Apostles' Creed, the seven
sacraments of the Church, and the seven corporeal works of mercy (feeding the hungry, giving
drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, housing the homeless, visiting the sick, aiding prisoners and
burying the dead). Confessional manuals were full of advice regarding youthful failings, especially
concerning that sin that most obsesses adolescents. Confession brought consolation, freedom, and
a lifting of the burden of sin, but it also imposed its own burdens, of ecclesiastical discipline and
social control. The duty might have seemed more evident than the liberation.
Adolescence - third of the seven ages of man - was judged to last between the ages of fifteen and
twenty-four, and was recognized as an age which must be ruled, for 'lusty iuventus' (youth) was by
nature ignorant, ill-disciplined and savage. Against adolescents 'the Devil doth lay all his ordinance
and use all his engines against the soldiers of Christ.' warned Erasmus. Living in household together
as servants and apprentices, adolescents shared their lives, their rooms, their beds. Richard Whitford,
monk and moralist, counselled spiritual exercises upon waking - making the sign of the cross from
head to foot, from left to right - but he knew how some 'who lie two or three sometime together,
and in one chamber divers beds and so many in company' would be mortified by the jeers of mocking
bedfellows if they practised such devotions: 'O Jesu, what I hear now?' Adolescence was not usually
a time for vaunting piety. Boys were notorious for swearing. Curses are chosen because they shock;
so in the sixteenth century they would always be religious: 'God's passion, God's wounds, God's
nails, and ever His holy and blessed blood.' There was a cautionary tale of an apprentice. He swore
so often by God's bones that his own bones cleaved through his flesh; a mirroring punishment for
such blasphemy. This was society in which the young were allowed no authority. For young men
to command was against the law of nature: they must obey until they had achieved mastery of their
baser desires. The prevailing ideal was gerontocratic; only the old had gravitas and wisdom enough
to rule. Not until the age of twenty-four were men considered ready to be ordained to the priesthood
or emancipated from apprenticeship; only then could they set up independent, single households.
Adolescence was ended by another rite of passage, another sacrament: marriage.
Marriage brought profound transformations: new privileges, obligations, freedoms and restrictions.
Sons became patriarchs; women exchanged duty to fathers foor duty to husbands. Men became
householders; women housekeepers. From being dependants - children, apprentices, servants - they
became masters and mistresses and bore authority. Women vowed at marriage to be 'bonere [gentle,
courteous] and buxom [compliant], in bed and at board', acknowledging the sexual duty of marriage.
They would bear children and become matrons themselves. And the transformation was irreversable,
'till death us do part'. A marriage was easily - too easily - made. The Church had long allowed that
the free exchange of vows before witnesses - it did not matter where - followed by sexual consummation constituted a valid, sacramental, marriage. When, in 1553, Mary Blage and Walter Cely told Edmund Parker that they wished to marry, he said, 'Well, I will play the priest', and invited
Walter to take Mary by the hand and say these familiar, binding words: 'I, Walter, do take thee,
Mary, to my wife; to have and to hold until death us do part, and thereunto I plight unto thee my faith
and my troth.' Their story, like that of many others, came before the Church courts, as at least one
party repented at leisure and asked ecclesiastical judges to find a way to dissolve a union which was
virtually indissoluble and which the Church's permissive doctrine had allowed. Women found themselves married to men who had seduced them but would not stay with them; men married women who deceived them and had plighted troths elsewhere. In the highly charged atmosphere of the
royal court, Lady Margaret Douglas, Henry VIII's niece, and Lord Thomas Howard dared in 1536
to contract a secret marriage. It led Lord Thomas to the Tower, where he wrote some of the most
tragic, if stilted, of Tudor love poetry, and where he died.

Oh, ye lovers that high upon the wheel
Of fortune be set, in good adventure,
God grant that ye find aye love of steel
And long may your life in joy endure.
But when you come by my sepulture
Remember that your fellow resteth there,
For I loved eke [also], though I unworthy were.

Clandestine marriage often ended in tears. It excluded parents, family and friends, whose presence
to witness the new union celebrated and sanctioned a new affinity. It banished the clergy, who
objected to the laity 'playing the priest'. Marriage without public spousal rites seemed anarchic,
not a sacrament in the sense of a social institution. A marriage - wedding - which the whole community affirmed involved the reading of banns, a solemnization before a priest, the exchange
of vows, the blessing of the ring, a public pledge at the church door, and ideally the blessing of a
nuptial mass inside the church. Marriage feasts and revels followed. The solemnization of marriage
was forbidden during Lent, Rogationide and Advent, and the prohibition was respected. Nor did
weddings take place during the busy harvest season, but followed the rhythms of the agricultural
year. The most popular period for marriage was at the time of the annual hiring fairs, after the harvest,
when young farm servants received their wages and left their masters' houses to seek new opportunities. This was a time of relative prosperity after harvest, a moment to celebrate at church
and bride ales (feasts). Marriage for love was usually the dubious privilege of those with little to
lose: the poor. For the rest, love in marriage was its consequence rather than its cause. Marriage was
too serious a matter to be left to sentiment and passion, for it not only altered the lives of the couple,
creating new duties towards each other and their children, it also forged family alliances, ended or
exacerbated local vendettas, and might be a means to political and tenurial aggrandizement.
The warring Houses of York and Lancaster was united by the marriage of Henry VII to Elizabeth
of York. Royal children were used as pawns in international diplomacy. Gentry families tended to
make marital alliances with their localities, binding other families to their own.
The Church insisted that marriage be made by free consent, and recognized no parental right to
determine children's choices, but utterly dependent children, especially daughters, brought up in
obedience and deference, were unable or unwilling to gainsay obdurate fathers and mothers, whose
duty it was to marry them off. Henry VIII's sister Princess Mary dutifully married, and buried,
Louis XII of France. Bravely, she told her brother that she had married once to please him, but
should he refuse to allow her now to marry Charles Brandon, 'I will be there whereas your grace
nor none other shall have any joy of me': in a convent. They married in 1515, without his consent.
For girls of gentry and noble families, there was little alternative to marriage. Sir William Ayscough
'covenanted' with his Lincolnshire neighbour, Kyme, 'for lucre' to marry his daughter to Kyme's
heir. This proved to be a hellish marriage from which Anne Ayscough [Askew] sought consolation
in religion. A couple were fortunate if love led to a match which accorded with prudence. In March
1497 Edmund Plumpton wrote in a fever of excitement to his kinsman, Sir Robert Plumpton.
'Lovers and friends' of Edmund's in London had introduced him to a widow 'good and beautiful,
womanly and wise . . . of good stock and worshipful'. Her name was Agnes. She and he were 'agreed,
in one mind and all one', but her friends demanded a jointure of 20 marks a year, and Edmund
needed help in order to marry her. 'It were otherwise my great undoing forever.' This courtship
contained many of the ritual elements: friends and 'lovers' as matchmakers, the exchange of gifts
(she gave him a cross set with rubies and pearls), financial negotiations. Their marriage took place,
but the couple did not live happily ever after. In 1501 Robert Tykhull, a gentleman of Holburn in
London was pardoned for the murder of Edmund Plumpton on the grounds that he had acted in self-defence. Complicated financial negotiations attended the making of marriage for the nobility
and gentry. Sir Francis Lovell wrote to Lord Lisle in September 1534, hoping that 'your noble blood
and my poor stock shall be by the grace of God confedered together' by the marriage of his elder
son to Lisle's second daughter, Lady Elizabeth Plantagenet. If Lisle would provide a dowry of £700
in cash, Lovell would ensure an income for Elizabeth of £100 each year for life; her jointure.
This was a typical financial agreement. The immediate cost of the dowry might be huge, but it was
the provision of the jointure which was the greatest gamble, because the widow could live long
and independently, to ruin of her husband's family estate. Sir John Bassett of Devon sent two
daughters, Anne and Thomasine, aged about ten and twelve, to live in Giles, Lord Daubeney's
household, intending that one should marry Daubeney's son and heir; whichever of them Daubeney -
rather than his son - chose. Should these daughters die, or fail to please, Bassett promised by indenture
in 1504 to deliver another. Transactions such as these seem to tell more of property transfer than
parental devotion, but parental love was not expressed in legal documents. Rather than being heartless
marriage brokers, parents were finding ways to provide for children who might easily be left
orphaned. Poorer couples, too, waited until they could set up an independent household before they
married; and they waited a long time. Peasant couples needed a farm or smallholding and a cottage
(a half-yardland, a farm of about fifteen acres, was the minimum holding upon which a family could
support itself without other employment); artisans a craft; and labourers a steady demand for their
labour. The wealthy, taking pity upon girls without dowries condemned to long spinsterhood, often
left bequests towards 'poor maidens' marriages'. In times of particular deprivation and dislocation -
as in the 1550s and 1590s - the rate of marriage declined altogether as people lacked the confidence
and resources to marry and begin families. In mid-sixteenth century London Robert Trappes and
Ellen Tompkins 'made merry gently and lovingly together' and wanted to marry, but Ellen was a
'poor wench and liveth only on her service' and Robert was an apprentice, 'poor young man', though
with a rich father, with no certain prospects. How could they marry? Both men and women married
very late, usually in their late twenties. And this was at a time when people were taught that all
'fleshly meddling' outside marriage was a deadly sin. Early in the century, another apprentice,
Anthony Pountisbury, a mercer's son of Cheapside, had 'an inward love to a young woman', and
tried to marry her, but his master had him arrested on his wedding day. Anthony claimed that this
prohibition of apprentices to marry 'causeth much fornication and adultery'.