- Tudor home is icon of Britishness
- Quaint relics of the past – changed them and us
- Age of discovery and anything is possible – change most evident in the home, domestic life transformed
- As with anything new there were risks
- Life threatening changes made their way into the heart of the Tudor home
- Emergence of people with new wealth – aspirations for their homes
- New homes introduced hidden killers to the home
- Newly discovered lands brought killers home into the kitchen and dining room
- Boom in trade, prospering in trade and new goods including food and furniture, home became more comfortable than ever home
- Increase in material goods
- Dining room – taste for the new and exotic
- Until the 1540s the English didn’t have a word for orange
- Sugar became more available with lower prices – slave trade
- Medieval diet rather bland, enhanced with sugar in Tudor period
- Sugar needs to be broken up – work hours as well as expense, desirable way of displaying status
- Could play with sugar to shape and dye it
- Huge release of energy when sugar introduced to a diet that had none before
- Consumption more widespread but caused trouble – changes in disease patterns over time, impact of sugar on health
- Dental health – marked change in dental health. Medieval teeth much healthier than Tudor skulls as sugar introduced
- Methods of cleaning teeth in the Tudor period made things worse
- Used solutions to clean their teeth containing sugar or alabaster
- Kissing comfits were sweets which took away bad breath but damaged teeth
- Sugar also affects chemicals in the body – serotonin, pleasure chemical
- 1592 Tudors began recording deaths – 113 people cause of death bad teeth, tooth disease can be a killer
- Bacteria from the teeth can get into other parts of the body and create serious health problems, there was little to be done except remove the teeth
- Sugar was a slow killer – centuries for its true impact to be felt
- Biggest danger was the construction of the home itself – the chimney
- Before the chimney was adopted houses could easily fill with smoke
- Had a great hall with a fire in the centre and a hole in the roof, allowed fumes to build up in the home
- Anyone who could afford to would have had a chimney installed, made the home more comfortable
- First chimneys were experimental – push the chimney to the end of the room and then divide into several rooms
- For the first time homes could have an upstairs level with separate rooms
- Fireplace and chimneys revolutionised domestic life
- Regular reports of fires sweeping through whole towns
- Stratford-upon-Avon two major fires in 1594 and 1595 which destroyed the town
- Tudors examined the construction of the chimney – work not necessarily done to the highest specification
- Chimneys at first made from wood and earth – not sensible materials
- Tudor builders struggled to make the chimney function
- Need to make the chimney draw the smoke away from the fire, without that the smoke would get stuck and then ignites – the smoke catches fire
- Houses had thatched roofs, easy to ignite from a chimney
- Tudors didn’t know that they needed to clean the chimney regularly
- Pamphlets chart the impact of fires – could be lethal and lose property
- 1/3 of towns were destroyed were some fires, traced back to not looking after their chimney
- Biggest cause of death wasn’t the fire itself
- 9,000 coroner’s inquest records from the Tudor period – new insights into death in the Tudor home
- More house collapses killing people than fires, chimneys collapse during fires
- Brick was new, but early bricks had a hidden weakness and could handle the heat, and explode
- Kent 1518 fire breaks out, several men tried to put the fire out, but in the course of the fire the brick chimney collapsed on top of them
- Drew up health and safety laws for chimneys – Oxford 1582 makes it the responsibility of the house owner to build their chimney from right materials
- Great fire of London 1666
- House still largely Medieval
- No such thing as a bathroom or a shower for the Tudors
- The woman had to bring the water to the house, heavy to carry
- Many chores were forced to be done outside in all weathers i.e. laundry and washing
- Spent much time at the nearest water source i.e. rivers or lakes
- Many people drowned, 2010 2% of accidental deaths were drowning, in the 16th century it was about 40%
- Largest cause just fetching water
- Often drowned in quite shallow water, temperature cold and first response is to gasp – if you’re underwater you swallow water
- Difficult to keep balance due to heavy skirts made from wool which absorbs water
- Wool can absorb up to 1 ½ times its own dry weight
- Combination of heavy clothing, shock of cold water, and the slippery ground
- Tudors began to take precautions – began to cover wells and fence off rivers, adding water pumps
- Drowning declined as these measures were put in place
- Domestic life just encompassing the home itself is a modern notion
- Straw and hay on the floor – the top layer would be changed but the bottom layer might be there for 20 years
- The hay and straw could absorb ale, vomit, wee, fish guts, etc
- Cut on your leg and went out, could get dysentery or gangrene
- Childbirth was dangerous – 20 out of 1000 died in Tudor period, 8 out of 10000 die in childbirth today
- Easier to get infected without antibiotics, little hygiene
- Infection was a hidden killer
- Cut themselves or break a limb, wouldn’t die from that now, but could get infected and then die
- If you were ill in the 15th or 16th century you wouldn’t call a doctor but treat yourself with recipes passed down through the generations
- Recipes contained herbs to cure ailments
- Physic garden in a big Tudor house
- People knew where to go in their local area to pick herbs
- Tansy used for intestinal worms, rue and penny royal used for abortion, lungwort used for lung infections
- 150 plants were considered to have useful medicinal qualities and were prepared in the home
- Medical remedies today are based on the plants, used in a different way
- Herbal cures were dangerous – wrong doses could kill you
- Something that looks like the thing you’re trying to treat was supposed to help i.e. pilewort for piles
- Tudor medicine could always go disastrously wrong
- Radical German invention Guttenberg printing press – easier to pass on knowledge to others
- Mid-16th century home manuals became more popular
- Bestsellers were reprinted to meet demand – also included recipes, supposedly written by a medical expert
- Medical books were pivotal in the Tudor home, supposed to help people in the absence of a doctor
- Something which has been alive can be used to heal someone dying but could be fatal if applied to an open wound
- Basic problem with all cures – based on fundamental misunderstanding
- Tudors didn’t know about causes of diseases
- Based on 4 humours, disease thought of as an imbalance of humours
- Knowledge in books would have thought to be on the cutting edge, real cures still hundreds of years away
- Human dissection was banned until the 1540s under Henry VIII – they were allowed to use bodies hanged at the gallows
- The Tudors were promiscuous, frowned upon but people still did
- 1497 disease was recorded for the first time via sex – the pox
- “Pestilent infection of filthy lust”, wrath of god, bacterial infection called syphilis
- The Tudors knew enough to link syphilis to sex
- Society very linked to signs and symptoms, marks on sexual organs as a result of sin and promiscuity
- Brothels aided spread of disease
- Association with sex meant that a sufferer was bound to be a social outcast
- Signs of syphilis disguised – made false noses to cover up the damage
- A lot of effort went in to finding a remedy with so many people suffering, but the cure could kill you faster than the disease
- One suggested cure was mercury – thought to benefit those with skin complaints
- May have had an effect locally on the area affected
- Made cream containing mercury, which could be rubbed onto the skin – main hazards due to inhalation of mercury fumes
- Mercury affects the nervous system causing pins and needles and numbness, losing sense of balance, convulsions and memory loss
- Bedroom full of harmful mercury vapours
- Can’t agree on where syphilis came from even today
- No cure for syphilis until centuries later until the advent of antibiotics
- First microscopes invented 1590s – need machinery to develop cures
- Tudor century witnessed a revolution in how people lived their lives
- New technologies transformed the nature of domestic life and began to usher in the modern age
- Some dangers took centuries to expose
Tudor Blogger 
Good site! I really love how it is easy on my eyes and the data are well written. I’m wondering how I might be notified when a new post has been made. I have subscribed to your feed which must do the trick! Have a nice day!
LikeLike