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Britain 1500–1750

Elizabethan Society

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Learning objectives

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Learn about what life was like for most people in Tudor times.

Learn about the different social classes in Tudor society.

Explore the lives of Tudor women.

Learn about health and medicine in the Tudor period.

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During the reign of Elizabeth I, about eight out of ten people lived in villages in the countryside.

Towns and villages

80%

20%

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Towns and villages

Most of these people worked on farms for rich landowners because few people could afford to own land. They would sow crops and harvest them, as well as looking after animals such as cows and sheep.

The growth of sheep farming caused unemployment and hardship, as it required fewer farm workers than growing crops.

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Towns had inns for travelling businessmen and people coming to the markets.

The biggest towns at this time were London, Norwich and Bristol.

These, and other towns, began to grow in the Tudor period due to the growth of the cloth industry and trade with other countries.

Towns and villages

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Rich and poor

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Sumptuary laws

The Tudors were so worried about maintaining the strict hierarchy in society that they even passed laws about how different people were allowed to dress.

These were known as Sumptuary Laws.

For example, only the royal family was allowed to wear the colour purple, cloth of gold (cloth woven with strands of gold) or sable furs.

Those below the rank of knight were banned from wearing velvet.

Ladies could not trim their cowls with pearls unless they were at least a baroness.

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Marriage was usually arranged between men and women of the same class. The Countess of Shrewsbury married four times, each time inheriting her husband’s money and became the richest person in England other than the queen!

Wealthy women ran large households of servants, and so controlled many people’s lives.

Women became more important when their husbands travelled on business or to the court of the queen.

As well as directing the work of the house, wealthy women would also visit the sick and settle minor disputes.

Women

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Poor women worked alongside their husband in the fields, as well as raising children.

Women would also usually spend long hours making and mending their family’s clothes and cleaning and maintaining the house.

They would deliver children for other poor women and help look after the sick.

Many women died young due to infections following childbirth.

Women

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As you have seen, Elizabethan society was divided in many ways. However, some things were the same for everybody, whether rich or poor.

Nobody in Tudor times really knew what caused diseases such as the dreaded plague and so could do little to cure them.

Health and medicine: the great leveller

It was commonly thought that disease was spread by ‘bad air’. People often carried little balls of fragrant herbs called pomanders to drive away bad smells.

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Health and medicine: the great leveller

Do you think the rich were better off than the poor?

Rich people could afford physicians, who used the ideas and cures of ancient Greek and Roman writers.

One of their commonest treatments was bleeding, when a patient would have some blood drained from their body.

Poor people relied on village wise-women and their herbal remedies.