Daily Life in Elizabethan England

If you were born in Elizabethan England: –5% of you would die within the first week of your life –40% of you wouldn’t survive to your 15 th birthday. Approximately 1/100 mothers died in childbirth.

While boys were prized, the birth of a healthy child, regardless of the sex, was cause for celebration. When a baby was born, families might consult an astrologer to determine if the date and time of the baby’s birth was fortunate. People’s lives were thought to be determined by God and could be read in the alignment of the stars and planets.

Most babies born to middling and well to do families were breast fed by wet-nurses, women hired out to perform this service. It was generally believed that a woman’s breast milk contained elements of her character and so wet nurses known for their virtuous character were in demand.

Because so many babies died in infancy, it was important for the baby to be baptized soon after birth.

Babies were weaned at about 2 or age 3. Boys and girls both wore skirts until they were toilet trained. Boys who were old enough to wear pants were considered ‘breeched’.

Babies were named after godparents or relatives. The most common names for girls were: Elizabeth, Ann, Mary, Margaret and Katherine. The most common boys’ names were Henry, Thomas, Edward, John, William and Robert. If a child died, his or her parents might give the next child born the same name.

Children were considered miniature versions of adults with no consideration for a child’s particular emotional, physical or spiritual needs out of infancy. Adolescence was not considered a special period in a child’s life. Parental authority tended to continue into early adulthood.

Young boys in middling and upper classes might go to grammar school, through their parents’ guilds or a local parish church. Instruction was largely through rote memorization, and discipline was notoriously strict. Schoolmasters were permitted to beat unruly students.

Girls as a rule were not formally educated. Some girls born to wealthy parents might be taught to read and write English, Latin, or French as Queen Elizabeth herself was.

Most girls, however, were taught the skills most necessary to be housewives and mothers. They learned to sew, collect and cultivate herbs for medicinal purposes, cook, clean and keep house, manage servants if necessary, and run a household.

Children from noble families were frequently sent to other noble households to be trained in etiquette, social graces and protocol. Young girls in service might learn to sing, play an instrument or dance. Queen Elizabeth’s ladies in waiting came from the most powerful and wealthy families in England.

After schooling, boys were apprenticed in a trade.

After seven years of apprenticeship, they could become a journeyman and work for wages. A few of the middling classes might attend University, like Edmund Spenser who wrote The Faerie Queene.

In Shakespeare’s time, wealthy families arranged their children’s marriages. Poorer and middling class families had more freedom of choice for marriage partners. While a generation earlier it was uncommon to marry a partner for love, this was changing in the 1590s. Many parents might arrange a marriage, but children increasingly had the right to refuse a potential partner, and their opinion was solicited in the matter.

About 85% of the population worked as common farmers, craftsmen and laborers.

You rarely bathed, and if you did, it was no more than once a year. Bathing was thought to spread disease, not prevent it. You lost many of your teeth, if not most of them, by the time you were in your 40’s and 50’s. If a tooth bothered you, you could visit a barber and have it pulled, without painkillers or anesthesia.

You probably owned one or two outfits which you wore most everyday. Underneath your clothes, you would wear a linen garment called a shift. For boys it reached to their knees. For girls it was a little longer. You might wash this shift if you had another one to wear in its place.

Without baths or indoor plumbing, late 16 th century England was pretty stinky.

If you were fortunate enough to live in a house, you would have a chamber pot to urinate in. If you were luckier still, you would have a servant to empty it in the street outside your house for you. Otherwise, you might have to use a communal pit, called a public privy.

There was no legal drinking age in Elizabethan England. Taverns, pubs and alehouses were popular places for people to congregate, share a pint of ale and gossip or transact business.

For entertainment you might play lawn bowls, a kind of bowling on grass, shuttlecock, even lawn tennis, backgammon or dice.

You would buy your food from vendors everyday if you lived in London. You would buy fresh bread, meat pies, eels, and other foods.

Fleas and lice were an unpleasant fact for everyone. Many people shaved their heads and wore wigs to fend off lice. Fleas were so common, that the famous poet John Donne wrote a love poem for a woman that involved sharing a flea between them.

Primarily because of the fleas and rats, people became sick of the plague most every year.

Illness and disease were a constant presence and medicine was at best a crude and rudimentary field. Mortality rates were appalling for adults and children alike. The average lifespan was close to 40 years.

Queen Elizabeth died in 1603, at age 70.