Fasts, beatings and hangings : the reality of Tudor style in childhood

HISTORY

Tudor Children by Nicholas Orme (Yale £20,288pp)

When you look at Tudor drawings of children riding oxen, harvesting corn, or playing with hobby horses, they seem to have strangely grown-up faces.

In Nicholas Orme’s fascinating snapshot of Tudor children in his new book on the subject, we see 1500 illustrations of swaddled babies and toddlers in their wheeled walkers, all looking like little wizened old men.

It’s almost as if the Tudors didn’t really believe in childhood. “Were there, as we understand it, children in Tudor England?” Orme asks – or were they just treated like little adults from birth, living short, hard, overworked lives?

Getting to the truth is not easy, precisely because children were not considered particularly interesting in Tudor times. In large parts of the population, they were simply put to work from the age of five to earn money for their hungry families. They could be hanged for crimes just as adults could, and even the minor punishments were severe: a boy, Peter Carew, who played truant from his school in Exeter, was punished by being ‘tied to a rope and led around the city like a dog’.

There was no rule for kids to go to school and, I must say, I would have avoided it. Schoolmasters shouted, “Up with him!” if a boy misbehaved and the unfortunate scoundrel was carried to the front of the class and held on the back of another boy who pulled down his trousers for the master to birch him on his bare buttocks.

A wealthy family at ease: But life was hard for most of the kids

A wealthy family at ease: But life was hard for most of the kids

More was recorded about the lives of upper-class children than lower-class children. The Tudor educator Sir Thomas Elyot wrote a book called The Governor, on how highborn sons and daughters should be brought up, and I think we can blame him for fostering the reign of cordiality that would take root in the state schools of Great Britain. He decreed that all boys should be trained in riding, hunting, running, and wrestling.

He was not so strict in the pursuits of girls and begged them to acquire the skills of weaving and cooking.

But don’t be fooled that Tudor girls’ upbringing was purely domestic. The future queen, Elizabeth I, was well-educated in foreign languages ​​and wrote a letter in fluent Italian at the age of 11.

I loved this book for its pin-sharp glimpses into what really happened in children’s everyday lives and minds. Of all the unlikely sources, Orme stumbled upon a few foreign-language Tudor textbooks with sample sentences for translation. “We’ll make a pit and throw our nuts there.” Ah, so that was a common game.

‘You stink. . . you are worthy of being hanged.’ “I will kill you with your own knife.” “He’s the meanest coward who ever pissed.”

don't be fooled that the education for Tudor girls was purely domestic.  The future queen, Elizabeth I (pictured), was well-educated in foreign languages ​​and wrote a letter in fluent Italian at the age of 11

don’t be fooled that the upbringing of Tudor girls was purely domestic. The future queen, Elizabeth I (pictured), was well-educated in foreign languages ​​and wrote a letter in fluent Italian at the age of 11

Slightly more exciting than the current textbooks with boring example sentences such as ‘In the weekend I like to go to the cinema with my friend’.

Boys played with dolls. The mother of a two-year-old Tudor boy, John Johnson, wrote to her husband, begging him to bring “a baby” from London – “baby” is another word for doll.

From puppet shows, boys moved on to nest-robbing, cockfighting, bird-catching—and the popular sport of half-burying a rooster and pointing missiles at it. So not much sentimentality about children or animals at the time.

Bed sharing was the norm at the time: two to a bed until age 15 at Christ’s Hospital school, and three to a bed (head-to-toe) for choristers at Winchester College.

One boy slept in the same bed as his schoolmaster, and another in the same bed as his uncle, who was a priest. We can’t know if those were sexual abuse situations or just a matter of space.

One thing we do know is that once the Reformation got underway in the mid-1530s, the Puritans couldn’t stop preaching the virtues of virginity and chastity to young people.

They were also keen for children to fast. Forced to eat fish every day during Lent, a poor boy wrote, “How tired I am of fish!”

And in the early days of the printing press, they tried to dissuade them from reading their secular Robin Hood-esque stories, which they despised as “fables of love, wantonness, and bawdyness, so filthy as the heart cannot think, to corrupt the mind . of youth’.

They wanted children to live exclusively on a diet of the Bible.

That was the cultural battleground of the 16th century, but Tudor children were not so easily turned away from their favorite book, Bevis, full of murder, battles, knights, monsters, imprisonment and kidnappings.

A Venetian in the 16th century sharply remarked that England had a “lack of affection.” . . strongly manifested towards their children’.

He referred to the practice of placing children in other people’s houses, where boys took on the roles of sculptors, cupbearers or choristers, and girls as young ladies-in-waiting, or in many cases as menial servants trapped in the scullery.

But as Orme suggests, that tradition wasn’t all bad. Living in other households has taught teenagers good manners, hard work and broadened their horizons. They hardened you, those Tudor mamas and papas.

Orme’s detective work has opened our eyes to that lost generation.