The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

In the restricted society of the nobility and gentry of England, the sense of lineage was vital to its
members' self-conception. Seeing themselves as part of a line, with a future and a past, they recognized a compelling duty to the family that came before and would come after, and to the land
which was the source of the family's wealth and power. The present head of the family was steward
of the patrimony, and it was his responsibility to pass this inheritance to his descendants. Laws of
property and laws of entail ensured that estates were not lost to the male family line in the event of
a failure to produce children. When William, Lord (later Marquess of) Berkeley (d. 1492) sacrificed
the interests of his brother and heir to his own, his seventeenth-century biographer condemned his
unnatural behviour: 'This man was born for himself and intended his house and family should end
in himself.' A noble needed to assert the family 'honour' and 'worship', and to maintain the wealth
and authority of the family commensurate with its inherited status and right. To exercise 'lordship'
was the natural prerogative of the leading lineages and to the lord was owed the service and fiedlity
of servants and tenants who held the family's lands, and of the dependent gentry who made up his
affinity. In uncertain times, the affinity might rise in arms for the lord and the kin be called upon.
Yet by the end of the sixteenth century kinsmen were no longer bound in loyalty to name and blood
to act; especially not to act against the Crown. For the nobility and gentry, as the century wore on,
the sense of family became less a practical, political consideration than a genealogical obsession,
as those of 'ancient blood' sought to prove their descent through many generations, and arrivistes
invented theirs. Heraldry was studied as the source of memory for a lineage and as a flamboyant
declaration of descent. The world of kin was open and flexible. Recognition of kin depended upon
affection, neighbourhood, cupidity and politics, beyond the simple ties of blood. People could behave
as kinsmen should to those who in genealogical terms had little claim upon them, and indigent cousins
would look, hopefully, to grand and distant relations for favour. Even for the nobility and gentry,
loyalty and pride in name and blood did not transcend the interests of the head of the family and his
heir, and the stern recognition of the paramount duty of defending the estate. For upper and lower
orders alike, the sense of family that mattered and where the ties of obligation and affection were
strongest, ran up, and down, through three generations, from parents to children and grandchildren,
and across to nephews, nieces and cousins. The family was defined very narrowly indeed when it
came to the transmission of property. Through most of England, except, unusually, in the Weald of
Kent, and in the remote uplands and the Scottish Marches, among almost all those with something
to pass on, the principle of primogeniture prevailed. Lands and wealth passed to the eldest son,
right was accepted without question, if not always without resentment. For the landed society of
England, wealth was something to be inherited, not created; passed on, not passed around.
Generation by generation, the gap between the prosperity of the head of the family and his descendants, and the youger brothers were usually left some modest annuity and daughters were
given a marriage portion; not only through affection, but because it did not accord with the 'worship'
of a house for sons to live in penury or daughters to marry beneath them.
The family represented an ideal of permanence which was spiritual as well as secular. Lords were
buried in churches near their family seats. Entombed in chantries resplendent with the family arms,
with prayers for souls endowed in perpetuity, lords asserted their authority even in death, and the
immortality of their family. Heraldic emblems were displayed on tombs, in windows, on vestments,
in pavements, as symbols of the undying family, in despite of death and infertility. The emblems
of the northern nobility - the saltire of the Nevilles of Raby, the bend azure of the Scropes of Bolton
- were emblazoned in local churches. In the late fifteenth century some nobles and gentlemen still
chose to lie under effigies of recumbent knights in armour, with a faithful dog at their feet, for they
continued to see themselves as a martial order. In Ireland that memorial tradition continued longer,
and there, where mourning was so extravagant that there was a proverb 'to weep Irish', lords like
Tibbot na Long Mayo in the early seventeenth century had 'weepers' sculpted on their tombs.
Further down the social scale, among the common people of England, lineage may have meant little.
For them, the world of kin hardly existed beyond the nuclear family. If they made wills, bequests
to kin other than children were rare. Migration undermined the bonds of kinship. On the wild uplands
of the borders with Scotland younger sons could stay at home, to run reive cattle, and kinship ties
remained strong. Elsewhere, teenagers apprenticed to relations in towns, or townspeople returning
to their home village to help bring in the harvest, might keep alive family relationships. Some left
money to bring their families together every year. But those children who left their cottage homes,
seldom to return, often lost touch with their relations, and created new families of their own upon
marriage. The poor, dispersed in search of work, lacking money to spend on family visits or hospitality, illiterate and unable to write letters home, became cut off. At the bottom of the social heap,
the indigent poor could help neither themselves nor their kin in the crises of want and illness and
old age. Parish registers testify to the anonymity and lonliness in which they lived and died.
Leaving home, the common people moved to villages and towns where the majority of households
were not linked by blood or marriage.

The family was at the heart of the wider - sometimes much wider - world of the household; a familia
of another kind. The household, consisting of family, its servants, dependants and possessions, was
the centre of all social, economic and artistic life, and the focus of political allegiance. The conjugal
family was universal: for the duke, as for the lowliest water-carrier, it was the same - father, mother
and children - except that in the case of a great nobleman, marrying young himself, and to a younger
wife, there was time to generate many more children. But the household of the great was quite different in kind. Magnanimous and gregarious, with swarms of servants and dependants to manifest
their master's greatness, a magnate's household often numbered the size of a village. Edward, Duke
of Buckingham, had 187 in his household in 1511-12 there were 166 men, women and children;
in the Earl of Rutland's in 1539 there were 135. Among the households of the realm, as everywhere
else, hierarchy and precedence were observed: the household of a duke must be greater than an earl's,
but lesser than the king's. The royal household, the court, was to be 'the mirror of others', in which
all lesseer households were reflected. In the household of a humble artisan and in the court of the
king alike the service of one man to another was the defining, dominant social relationship.
'Faithful service', owed not only to God but to the master, was the cohesive force of early Tudor society. In the unwritten code binding lord and man, service and 'faithfulness' were offered to the
lord in expectation of his 'favour'; the patronage and protection which constituted 'good lordship'.
Service was a personal relationship in which the servant could be called upon to perform any service
which the lord required. Service to a lord, even body service of a menial kind, was 'honourable',
imparting trust. Dishonour came only when that trust was broken, as in 1521 at the trial of the Duke
of Buckingham for treason when his chancellor betrayed secrets which intimate service had made
him privy to. The great lord's household maintained his estate - in the sense both of his landed power
and of his 'honour'. His household officers - all the stewards, bailiffs, chamberlains, constables and
keepers - duly moved into the aristocratic world of the lord's circle. Lords sometimes remembered
more officers and servants in their wills than relatives, for the relationship might be closer, the
loyalty greater. The 9th Earl of Northumberland told his son 'that in all my fortunes, good and bad,
I have found them [his servants] more reasonable than either wife, brother or friends'. The lord's
affinity, the overlapping groups of family, household and estate officers; all his 'well wishers',
'good servants', 'true lovers', who were 'bounden during life', might be a focus of loyalty in the local
and national community. Over generations one family might offer faithful service to another.
A great household was no mere domestic establishment, but the unifying centre of the family's
following, splendid in peace and armed in war. As he dined in public in his Great Chamber, waited
upon by carvers and cupbearers, servers and ushers, sung to by his minstrels, entertained by his
players and fools, a great lord at the end of the middle ages dazzled and awed with his magnificence.
Beneficence was a mark of honour; avarice a sign of shame. The great household should be open
to all, offering hospitality to the prosperous and alms to the poor. At Epiphany 1509 Buckingham
feasted at Thornbury, entertaining 519 to dinner and 400 to supper. In Gaelic Ireland, where conditions
were too unstable for courts and palaces and pageantry, the lords displayed their greatness through
hospitality. The Irish annalists, recording the deaths of Gaelic lords, customarily remembered their
hospitality and liberality. In England, lords endowed public works, repairing highways, supporting
hospitals and lazar [leper] houses and prisons; their almoners gave alms and 'broken meat' [leftovers]
to the expectant poor, all in return for prayers. Although some household accounts record larger sums
spent on gambling than on the poor, it was never forgotten that acts of charity were a social and religious duty.