The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (15 page)

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 and 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 loneliness 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 the 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 1503–4, and 225 on his check roll in 1511. In the Earl of Northumberland’s 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 lesser 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.

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 as well as devotion. The Duke of Buckingham ordered 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 a 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 at 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 very 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 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 adolescence with a family which was not their own. Servants were employed in agriculture, in trade and 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 abused their authority, and servants defied it, dying 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 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 prospects 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 craftsman 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 the sworn duty of a company member. The duty extended to dead members, whose 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.