Tudor Adverts

Although they could watch and take part in cruel activities like cock fighting and bear baiting, ordinary people were not allowed to play lots of games in Tudor times. They were supposed to practice the longbow in their time off in case they had to defend England. It was difficult to do target practice in winter so throwing shortened arrows - darts - at the end of a wooden barrel in the pub developed as a way of improving people's accuracy indoors. The game was commonly called Arrows. Henry VIII enjoyed playing darts. Anne Boleyn gave him a beautiful set of darts decorated with jewels before they were married. Dartboards could also have been made out of a slice of a tree, with players aiming to hit the centre. The growth rings on the tree would help players to decide the winner - the person who had got their dart nearest to the centre of the circle of wood.

Places to drink, relax, gossip, eat, social, entertainment and job centres, somewhere for the night - inns, taverns and alehouses were all these things and more. Inns had rooms for travellers, taverns sold things to eat as well as drink and alehouses sold ale and simple food. Travellers often used to stay the night and have a meal in monasteries before they were closed by Henry VIII. Then alehouses and taverns became far more popular, especially in towns on market and fair days when villagers came in to buy and sell goods. Alehouses were small buildings with a basic room to drink ale in and sometimes a room to sleep. Some alehouses offered food like bread, meat or pies to their customers. Often a poor family set up a simple alehouse to add to the money they got from other jobs. Alehouses were good places for people to go to meet their friends, sell things second hand, hear the latest news and chat over a drink. Jobseekers found out about work on offer. Alehouses became places where families held celebrations like christenings, marriage feasts and funerals. Some people even got married there! Games like cards, dice and backgammon were popular. There were chances to hear the latest ballads. Poor people could buy ale and food on account and pay the alehouse keeper back when they had money. This helped them through difficult times. Workmen and housewives could send out for a jug of ale for thirsty people at work or home. More men than women went to alehouses, and there were times when people drank so much that they got into fights, stole things, or spent the housekeeping money on ale.

When he was young Henry VIII was an excellent sportsman. He wanted everyone in England to be fit so they could fight for the country if necessary. One of Henry's favourite games was tennis. It was played indoors in a gallery or large room with a net that was 1.5 metres high at the edges and 0.9 metre high in the middle. Players had to hit the ball over the net, but could also score points by hitting it into one of three goals high in the walls. They could bounce the ball off the walls. Tudor tennis rackets were made of wood and strung with sheep gut. The leather tennis balls were filled with hair. They could have a core made of cork. Henry built a tennis court at Hampton Court Palace. It has room for spectators to sit and watch the king and his courtiers play. Lots of people made bets about who would win. Henry lost a lot of money by betting.

Before Tudor times most English adults and children drank ale with all their meals. Ale was an alcoholic drink made from malted barley, water and yeast. It could be flavoured with honey, spices and herbs like thyme and rosemary. As it was boiled, ale was usually safer to drink than water. In the 1400s English travellers, merchants and soldiers discovered beer in Europe. Beer is like ale but is boiled with hop cones. The hop is a climbing plant that gives beer its bitter taste and helps it to keep. This means that beer does not have to be as strong as ale for it to last. At first many English people did not like the idea of beer and complained about it. Henry VIII even passed a law forbidding people to use hops when they brewed. He said hops were a wicked weed that would spoil the taste of the drink and endanger the people, but hopped beer still caught on. Farmers in Kent in the south of England found they could grow hops well. Brewers found that they could make more beer than ale from the same amount of malted barley. One of the earliest English gardening books was all about growing hops.

English soldiers were famous for their skill with the longbow. Men and boys between 12 and 65 had to practice shooting on Sundays in case there was a war. Men who earned more than £2 a year had to own a bow. Every man was supposed to be able to shoot a target 220 yards away. English longbows could wound an enemy who was 220 yards away. The bowyer (bow maker) manufactured each bow from a single stave of wood. Yew was considered the best. A bow could be as much as six feet long. Most arrows were poplar, with a steel point and a flight at the opposite end made of strong feathers from a goose's wing. Hunting arrows had a broad point. They did not have to be shot so hard as they didn't have to pierce armour. War arrows had a fine point to get through armour. Henry VIII was excellent at sport and loved archery. He was as good as the best archers in his guard. In 1537 he granted the Fraternity of St. George, the first archery club, an official charter. The first archery competition was during Elizabeth I's reign, in 1583. There were 3,000 competitors. Newly invented muskets were used against the Spanish Armada in 1588. Seven years later muskets replaced longbows. The time of the English longbow as a deadly weapon of war had come to an end.

Henry VIII was responsible for building up the English navy and making it more successful than it had ever been before. He started the Royal Armouries in 1511 and dockyards on the River Thames two years later. To make English fighting ships really powerful Henry needed the latest weapons technology. The technology for making cannons improved by leaps and bounds whilst Henry was king. Early cannons were made of wrought (hammered) iron. They were fat tubes, with gunpowder at the bottom which fired cannonballs. They did not fire very far, they were not good at hitting their targets and they were likely to explode. The development of blast furnaces meant that cast iron could be produced in large quantities. Cast iron is stronger than wrought iron. The molten iron was poured into moulds to make cannons. English cannons became the best and cheapest in Europe. Cannons were used to protect the coastal defence castles Henry VIII built to protect England from invasion. They were very important on the new warships that were made during this time. These ships, like Henry's favourite, the Mary Rose, had cannons along their sides behind watertight doors called gun ports. The heavy cannons helped to make warships stable. Before Henry's time, ships had cannons at either end. Captains used to try to disable an enemy ship before sailors with swords went on board to fight the crew. The new warships were important symbols of Henry VIII's power. They could fire on an enemy ship broadside and destroy it. Even cannon balls were improved. They had been made of stone and were not always completely round. Cast iron cannon balls helped gunners to hit their target and penetrate it.

Cockfighting was a popular sport with many people. Henry VIII had a cock-pit built at Whitehall palace. Fights often took place at fairs on Shrove Tuesday. Children would watch as well as adults. Two male chickens, called gamecocks, were put into a ring together. Sharp spurs made of bone or metal were strapped over the spurs on the birds' legs so they could hurt each other more when they fought. The birds fought until one or both of them died. The fight could last a few minutes or as long as half an hour. Birds were trained to fight. Their owners wrapped their spurs in leather covers called hots to stop them damaging each other while they were trained. For a few days before a fight owners fed their birds on white bread and spring water. People would bet money on the bird they thought was going to win the fight. They also placed bets on what would happen when bulls or bears were baited. In bear baiting a bear was tied to a stake and fierce dogs were let loose to attack it. Dogs were often badly injured and the bear eventually died. There were 13 bears at a baiting that Elizabeth I watched in 1575. After bull baiting, the dead bull was taken to the butcher to be cut up for food. People thought that baiting the bull made its meat more tender to eat.

Tudor clothes - especially the king and queen's - were a great way of telling the world about how important, rich and powerful you were. Henry VIII and his daughter Elizabeth I were famous for their expensive and stylish clothes. Reports from abroad by diplomats and merchants weren't only about politics, trade and plots - they were about royal fashion. The codpiece became the Tudor fashion must-have for men. It developed from a practical and modest triangular cloth cover-up before the Tudors into a multi-purpose padded pouch worn where today's trouser flies are. Codpieces were not only a way for a man to show how rich and manly he was, they were also used as safe places to carry valuables and money around. They were more secure than a purse fixed to your belt by strings, which was easy for a thief, or cutpurse, to steal. Your codpiece could conceal the fact that you were having treatment for some diseases as well. In Henry VIII's reign, codpieces grew more and more extreme. They were large, made in strange shapes and decorated with jewels and embroidery. By the 1580s trendy men were wearing trunk hose, which were like large balloon-shaped shorts gathered half way up the thigh. Elizabeth I's royal court developed other ways of showing off its power to the world through its clothes.

In Tudor times there were hard laws to deal with criminals and people who made trouble. Public punishments for minor crimes included the pillory, the stocks, the ducking stool, and whipping at a whipping post. The pillory was a frame in a public place where the accused person was fixed and their head and hands were stuck through. The stocks were similar, but held the ankles. Local people were able to shout and throw rubbish at offenders in the pillory or stocks. Women and dishonest shopkeepers were tied into the ducking stool and ducked into a river a lot of times. Major crimes like treason resulted in torture, especially when Elizabeth I was queen. The Tower of London had cells and torture chambers. It was easy to get to by boat, it was near the royal court and it was very secure. It was a sign that you were an important criminal if you were locked up in the tower! Tortures included the manacles. They were like handcuffs on chains to hang people up by their wrists. Some prisoners were locked up in a cellar with rats or in Little Ease, a cell so tiny that they couldn't stand or even move properly. The rack was probably the most feared instrument of torture in the tower, as few people could stand the pain of being stretched on it. Among other equipment there was a machine called The Scavenger's Daughter, which bent and squashed its victims. Just the threat of torture was enough to make some people confess.

Soft toilet paper was unknown in Tudor times. And so for most people, were flushing toilets. Even kings and queens would have to sit on a board with a hole in the middle set over a pit. The rich might upholster their seats with velvets and ribbons but their privies, as they were called, were still very smelly. People would wipe their bottoms with leaves or moss or, for the better off, soft lamb's wool, but paper was far too expensive to throw away. In palaces and castles, which had a moat, the lords and ladies would retire to a toilet set into a cupboard in the wall called a garderobe. Here the waste would drop down a shaft into the water. In the country, the pit would be filled up when it was full - and a new one dug a little way away. Most privies had seats for just one person - but some had two - and one had six - to seat the whole family. At Hampton Court Henry VIII built a communal loo on two floors each room containing 14 seats. The sewage tumbled down a chute to a huge room - where it was emptied by a man called a gongfermor. Most people kept a chamber pot under their beds to use during the night. In the morning they would throw its contents out of the window - often drenching some poor passer-by. Town streets ran with sewage, which caused all sorts of health problems. Queen Elizabeth also used a close stool - like her father - until her godson Sir John Harington invented a new loo, which used water to flush the waste away. The idea was not new. The Romans also used water to keep their toilets clean. But this was probably the first time one had been made for individual use. Nobody took his invention seriously except the Queen, who had a 'necessary' installed at Richmond shortly before her death. Only she and her godson ever used one. The other courtiers thought it was a very silly device.