The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

The great household was also a religious community which must work for its own salvation and that
of its lord. The domestic chapels of great nobles were served by chaplains, morrow mass priests,
family confessors and riding priests (who rode with their lord on his journeys). The daily office, Mass
and prayers for the dead marked the household's day; they were a way of inducing order in his check
roll of 1519 that all household members attend Mass daily, because 'no good governance nor politic
rule may be had without service to God as well'. The nobility could use religious festivals and
processions to vaunt the extent of their following as well as their piety. When Buckingham visited
the tomb of Edward, son of Henry VI, in 1508 he was demonstrating to a doubtful Henry VII his
loyalty to the House of Lancaster. Reverence was owed to the 'worship' of a great family itself; to
its chivalric past and the immortality that virtuous deeds had conferred on the family arms. The family
badge - the Percy crescent or the Stafford swan - was a badge of virtue. It drew loyalty and must be
 defended, even if that loyalty was often expressed among the nobles' community of honour by acts
of violence. Positions of honour around great lords were taken by the sons of the nobility and gentry
who were sent, as young as seven, to another lord's household to be his pages of honour, his 'henchmen'. Since personal service was offered by social equals, a duke's son would be page to a
prince. Household officials, chaplains and schoolmasters may have been more important in bringing
up a nobleman than his own family. In great households boys learnt not only what it was to be lordly
and to 'keep countenance', but also the deference and duty to superiors upon which Tudor society
was founded. They learnt what it was to be gentleman; to possess not only wealth (though that was
important) but chivalry, courtliness, generosity and martial honour. The chivalric code, the highest
secular ideal, was instilled from an early age to discipline the knightly class by its emphasis on service, honour and loyalty. Chivalry was taught in theory through heraldry, history and romance,
and in practice through swordplay, riding, jousting and hunting. The nobility had an obligation to
lead in war. Fighting was not a distance, but hand-to-hand, usually on horseback; mortally dangerous
if the noble was skilled, lethal if not. In England, the custom of sending children away to be trained
in another lord's household was prevalent in the early sixteenth century, but dying out by the end.
In Ireland, the custom of fostering, where lords committed the upbringing of their young children
to others, endured and created intense and lasting loyalties. The death of two of his foster brothers
in 1597 preyed on the mind of the Earl of Kildare. Fostering had political consequences. In 1540 complaints reached the Privy Council that because of fostering 'all our secrets are discovered to the
Irishmen', and at the end of the century fostering between the Anglo-Irish and Gaelic-Irish was seen
as the 'bud of our bane', the cause of the English destruction. In humbler households, too, children
came to serve and to be trained. Leaving their family home, seldom to return to it, most children
found service in another household and spent their adolescense with a family which was not their
own. Servants were employed in agriculture, in trade crafts, and as domestic helpers, a group distinct
from wage labourers, who lived in their own homes. They comprised by far the largest occupational
group; perhaps one-third to half of all hired labour in agriculture. Servants, away from their family,
exchanged duties to parents for duties to masters and mistresses, and learnt that the world was organized by authority; that masters, like fathers, disciplined them, and taught deference along with a
craft. As in the great household, the servant owed duty and obedience; the master care and protection.
Servants lived as part of the family, eating and sleeping with them. Although some masters often bequeathed the responsibility of looking after widows and children to their servants, and servants might choose to stay on after the master's death. Close ties were formed not only between master and
servant but also among those in service together, as servants shared their work, rooms, beds and lives.
Service brought stability, yet youthful servants moved on, and since the contract of service was only
for a year, could be casual members of the household and community. Although the household was
the basic unit of society, it was mutable. The relationship between an apprentice and his master was
closer, more enduring. An apprentice was formally bound by oath and indenture to his master for a
term of ten years; to learn a trade, to live within his household, and to obey him. The master was bound also; to teach and to discipline his charge at this unruly stage of life. A master had a duty to chastise a disobedient apprentice, and a boy who wished to protest against ill-treatment had to prove
that he had been beaten more constantly than was considered reasonable. Apprentices were sent into
the adult world but were still utterly dependent; with prospect of wealth but with none yet.
About 1,250 youths arrived in London every year from all over England in the mid-century, and found a home and initiation into the ways of the great and growing metropolis. In Tudor London two-thirds
of all men had served as apprentices from the age of eighteen or so, and usually for terms of seven years. Apprentices formed a large element in London society; a disruptive element if ever they banded together, so curfews for apprentices were always ordered at times of political unrest. Yet they lived
under close supervision - for a master governed only one or two apprentices - and learnt what it was
to be a master of a trade and a household, a member of a company, and a citizen.
By apprenticeship a youth was initiated into the 'secrets' of a mystery or trade and promised mastership and membership of his craft fellowship in time. The craft guilds - a hierarchy of apprentices, journeymen (wage labourers), householders (or master craftsmen), liverymen and assistants - were enduring institutions in late medieval and early modern towns. Through their craft
fellowship a master and mistress and their household found a place in their town. The guilds, whose powers stemmed from the solidarity of their members, claimed the right to regulate the establishment
of businesses in the crafts and trades which they controlled, and to settle disputes among members
who were, after all, economic competitors. Membership of a guild was, in most towns, the only way
to citizenship, the possession of the prized 'freedom' which alone allowed full participation in economic, social and political life. In many towns only a citizen enjoyed urban privileges, including
the essential right to engage independently in economic activity, to set up shop as a master craftsmen
or retailer. In early sixteenth-century Coventry four of every five male householders were free of the
city; only they could take part in ceremonial processions or in the Corpus Christi plays. In Norwich
and York about half of the male population were citizens; in London three-quarters. The guilds were
essential in the ordering and defending of a town. It was through the guilds that marching watches
were arrayed at midsummer, when men paraded through the streets in military equipment; and through
the guilds that a town showed itself in ceremonial array - as at the entry of a monarch.
The fellowship in the craft was real. Spiritual brotherhood had been the first reason for the existence of the guilds, and in the sixteenth century the first reason still mattered. Guild members processed
and worshipped together on the day of their patronal feast and maintained lights in churches.
They attended the marriages and funerals of their fellows and the 'drinkings' afterwards: such was the action of a friend, the mark of respect of a colleague, but also sworn duty of a company member.
The duty extended to dead members, who anniversary masses were attended by their fellows. Charity
was given to members who were ill and old. Writing his will, a citizen of any town would describe himself first as citizen, then name his craft and lastly his parish. These were the fellowships which justified and sustained him.

Their families dispersed, their own kin distant and incidental, most people looked to other fellowships,
other communities, to assume the traditional obligations of kinship. From their neighbours, whom
they chose as 'trusty friends' and 'gossips' (godsibb), they might find the support and loyalty which kin had once provided in some lost world. Neighbours were chosen as godparents, attended childbirths,
baptisms, weddings, sickbeds and deathbeds; celebrated or commiserated at the rites of passage;
were witnesses to wills, and trusted to look after widows and orphans. They lent each other implements and money, and acted as guarantors and sworn witnesses before the courts. In the 'play called Corpus Christi', at the trial of Mary and Joseph the summoner calls Mary's neighbours to appear: Malkyn Milkduck, Lucy Liar, Fair Jane, Robin Red, Lettice Littletrust - the familiar world
of late medieval neighbourhood. True, it was neighbours who usually brought the charges in the first
place, for neighbourly relations often descended into quarrels and recriminations. Neighbours who were offended might - like the Wicked Fairy at the christening - curse. It was for violation of the duties owed by neighbours and in retaliation for some breach of charity that alleged witches performed acts of maleficence, the darkest example of malign neighbourly relations.
Even in the supposed anonymity of a great neighbourly obligations were taken seriously. In London
neighbourhoods loyalties could trascend the divisions between rich and poor and sustain friendships
between families who otherwise moved in different social spheres. People remembered poor neighbours in their own parishes in their wills; paupers whom they knew by name, like 'John with the sore arm'. John Stow, London's chronicler, recalled the great summer festivals of the 1530s, of his
youth, when wealthy citizens set out tables with food and drink and invited their neighbours to 'be merry with them in great familiarity'. Bonfires were lit; 'bon fires', according to Stow, because of the
'good amity amongst neighbours' they engendered. But Stow remembered this social unity half a
century later with the nostalgia of one who thought it lost and hardly to be recovered.
Neighbourliness and fellowship were Christian ideals; the amity in Christ created by one faith and
communion. In the course of the sixteenth century the fellowship of the neighbourhood was subject to
strains which eroded concord. Population increase and subsequent impoverishment undermined
the obligations of the rich to the poor, whom they were less and less likely to know personally.
Religious divisions fractured the community of faith. Yet the bonds of religious and social obligation
were strong and often held people together during this century when divergences in faith and economic exigencies threatened to drive them apart. That 'perfect love and charity' necessary before
anyone could receive the sacrament was not forgotten, however hard that amity was to achieve; neighbours might insist upon it, and priests exclude the rancorous and unforgiving until they were
reconciled with the community. That community was not only the neighbourhood, but also, more
formally, the parish. England's parishes, more than 8,000 of them, had been formed by 1300, as a
result of people's wish to worship together in small congregations close to their priest. This wish
remained in the early sixteenth century, and people worshipped in their parishes by custom, by desire
and by ecclesiastical sanction. Everyone was necessarily a member of a parish, with attendant duties
to attend and maintain the church and to support the priest; and rights to spiritual consolation through
the sacraments. Parishioners not only worshipped but celebrated together. At St Margaret Pattens in
London there was a bowl used, not for sacred, but for festive occasions: it was inscribed on the outside, 'Of God's hand blessed be he that taketh this cup and drinketh to me,' and on the inside,
'God that sitteth in Trinity, send us peace and unity.' Where there were disputes within a parish they
were put into arbritation, or 'daying'. Churchwardens' accounts everwhere tell of the determination of
parishioners to beautify their churches; of the church ales, plays and shooting matches organized to
finance the continuing rebuilding and adornment. This was a great period of church building; perhaps
a sign of devotional vitality, but not necessarily. In Renaissance Rome a high point of building
corresponded with a time of spiritual inanition.
In an ideal world mutual concern and charity among fellow parishioners, living and dying, would have been guaranteed. But the world was not ideal, and the community of the parishh was formal, compulsory, its boundaries fixed - no longer the voluntary association of fellow Christians it had been
at its origin. Seeking closer fellowship, people chose to join religious guilds both withint and beyond
their parishes. Brothers and sisters in these lay confraternaties swore oaths to support their living fellows through friendship and charity, and their dead members through their prayers. Brothers and sisters could be incorporated after death in the guilds' immemorial membership. Sisters in the guilds had - as almost nowhere else - more or less the same status as brothers. Religious guilds existed in
their thousands in England, and were still being founded, a vital expression of late medieval religious
life. In the early sixteenth century Londoners remembered over eighty guilds in half the parishes of
the City in their wills. In Dublin at the same period there were at least eleven religious fraternaties
flourishing in the City and the county. The guild dedicated to St Anne in the parish of St Audoen,
with its own chapel and chaplains, who celebrated daily at St Anne's altar, and six singing-men, was
the most important. This guild survived into the seventeenth century, a focus of intense Catholic
devotion. In Gaelic Ireland, where the bonds of kinship were so strong, there were no religious guilds,
no invented brotherhood. What marked the confraternities as religious? In which ways were the lay
brotherhoods spiritual? All the guilds maintained lights before the image of their patron saint upon
their own altars; their members attended mass on their patronal festivals; some supported their own
priest. The Christian imperatives of preventing sin and fostering virtue were paramount, and the guilds
insisted upon moral probity in commercial relations between the brethren. In their rules the first avowed purpose was to live in charity; in some guilds this ideal was symbolized by the kiss of peace.
Their duty was also to offer charity of another kind: the seven works of mercy towards their fellows,
especially burial of the dead. Some sought fraternity in a religious life more intense by far. The monastic way of life, to which all religious orders were in some way assimilated, had been in existence for almost a millennium by the early sixteenth century. Men and women still chose to live
as brothers and sisters in communities of witness, dedicated to God's service. At his profession, a
monk to vows of lifelong poverty, chastity and obedience to his abbot and his Rule. Regular canons
lived by a Rule like monks, but one step less divorced from the rest of the world. The mendicant
orders of friars - so called because they were originally meant to live by begging - followed Christ
in their preaching and apostolic poverty. The formal commitment of the religious orders to a shared
and regulated life forever separated them from both the laity and the secular clergy (priests). They were, above all, celebrants of divine service, and their penances and prayers might inspire the laity living beyond their walls. Their houses also offered alms to the poor and sheltered pilgrims and
travellers. In England in 1500 there were perhaps 10,000 monks and 2,000 nuns, living in 900 religious communities. In Ireland, a generation later, there were about 140 monastic foundations
and 200 mendicant communities. Most of these communities had fallen far from the pursuit of Christian perfection which was the ideal of their founders. Few truly religious houses remained.
Spiritual corporations had, over the centuries, become economic corporations. The religious houses were an integral part of society not only - or even - because of their penances and prayers, but because of their immense power as landlords. The religious had come to hold more wealth than they could easily control without prejudicing their spiritual life, and a pervasive secularism had entered the cloisters. In Ireland, the hereditary principle often prevailed in the succession to abbacies, in violation of the vow of chastity. The extravagant projects of building and adornment in Irish Cistercian houses cast some doubt upon their austere following of a Rule which insisted upon simplicity, though they
suggest vitality of a kind. Great and flaunted wealth attracted envy and detraction. In England, their
critics accused the 'monkery' of degeneracy, even of depravity, and suspected that their every vow
was travistied and broken. When the testing time came it was a matter of record that many of the
religious thought too much of the flesh they should have subdued; that their spiritual aspirations
were lost to the claims of the world. For the most part, if they did no good, they at least did little
harm, though that was shame enough. Some in the religious houses did seek Christ and provided
an inspiring example to the very end. In the Charterhouses, the monks followed their Rule of cold
austerity, silence, prayer. The Bridgettine foundation at Syon Abbey, established at Isleworth on the
Thames in 1415, manifested a spirit of renewal.