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Book Recommendation
Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat by Bee Wilson
Buy on Amazon here
TV Series: What the Tudors Did For Us
Learn more about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Tudors_Did_for_Us
Previous Episodes related to Tudor Inventions
Episode 096: The Royal Exchange and Thomas Gresham
Episode 126: Sugar in Tudor England
Episode 044: Elizabethan Theater
Rough Transcript on Tudor Inventions
The heavens leap, the earth exalts, our King does not desire gold or gems or precious metals, but virtue, glory and immortality. That’s William Blount on Henry VIII’s accession in 1509
Hello and welcome to the Renaissance English history podcast, a part of the Agora podcast network. I’m your host, Heather Teysko, and I’m a storyteller who makes history accessible because I believe it’s a pathway to understanding who we are, our place in the universe, and being more deeply in touch with our own humanity. This is episode 131 it’s a listener suggested episode on tutor inventions. First, I’d like to think my newest patron on Patreon though. That’s Donna. I just did a big rundown last episode of all my patrons, so I’m not gonna do that again right now, but thank you so much Donna, for your patronage. All of our patrons just received a free digital copy of the newest tutor activity book, which is about the field of cloth of gold and patrons at the $3 per episode level or higher, receive a free tutor planner each year as well as everybody gets.
Lots of other fun gifts and goodies. So if you’d like to join this highly intelligent group of people who support independent podcasting and storytelling, please go to patrion.com/england cast. And before we get started, I want to remind you about tutor con, which is, Oh my gosh, just about three weeks away. You guys, and ticket prices are going to go up on October 4th and that’s because it’s just two weeks away from the event. There’s more admin for us to get you in if you’re coming that late. So get your tickets before October 4th if you’re still on the fence, it’s time like procrastinators. I totally get ya. I’m right there with you. And now it’s like the time where you get off the fence. So there’s still tickets for this event. It’s three days of learning feasts, parties, and getting to do all of that with 120 of your new best tutor enthusiast friends.
And the more I look at this schedule, the more excited I get. We’re going to have amazing entertainers. We’re going to have live music from the King’s legacy, which is Michael Rowdy’s new musical on Friday night at the party, we’re going to have music from chase to treasure. That’s a group that sings kind of modern body music, but in a tutor style. We’re also going to have music from pastime, which plays authentic music. They’re going to be focusing on some of the music that Henry the eighth himself wrote. We’re going to have entertainment from Greg Ramsey who does a [inaudible] masters skit at the Pennsylvania Renaissance fair. We’re going have dancing lessons. It’s going to be so much fun and then we’re going to have talks. We’re going to have a medieval feast. It’s going to be amazing. So here’s the deal. You can go to England, cast.com/tutor con 2019 for all the details.
If you still have questions, you want to know something you aren’t sure if it’s for you. You want to kind of get your questions answered. Just email me and it’s going to be an amazing weekend. I would love to have you there, sharing it with us and if there’s anything that I can help you with as you make your decision, if you want to come or not, just send me an email and I get back to you right away. So now let’s talk inventions as we all know, because I’ve said it about a hundred times already on this podcast, the thing that fascinates me the most about the tutor period is the transition that we have going on from a medieval society to an early modern one that’s reflected in the rise of the middle-class, the societal upheaval that came from realizing that the earth is not actually at the center of the universe.
Oh my God. And that we’re just one teeny tiny planet with billions of planets making a billions of galaxies. We also experienced the reformation, the exploration, and first colonization of America. Imagine if you will, that you were a Londoner who was 20 years old in 1485 he fall asleep and you wake up in 1603 you would barely recognize your city, the old worship services, the rock upon which all society was built had completely disappeared. There were theaters, Protestant refugees, a shopping center. I mean what, Oh world. But what specific inventions did the tutors give us during this period? Let’s discuss. First I want to talk about two things that the tutors did not give us, which are often attributed to them. And that is chocolate and coffee. So I actually recently read in a book and it was a history book about how before the stock exchange people would do their business and their transactions at coffee shops nearby.
That wasn’t until the later mid to late 17th century. The first coffee shops in England didn’t open up until around the 1650s so the tutors would not have had coffee, they did not drink coffee, there were no coffee shops in London at the time. And chocolate as well did not come until again the the mid 17th century. So those are steward inventions. You could kind of call them tutors because of course they were related. So tutors and stewards. But that’s one thing that I often see given credit to the tutors for that. I want to dispel that coffee and chocolate, which of course are two of the very most important things in life. When you mix them together, you get heaven, but they were not tutor inventions, something that was a tutor invention though, who is the flushing toilet and it’s actually, I want to say the Romans and the Greeks did it have a version of a flushing toilet as well.
So they were kind of more advanced with that. But then of course it went away and we don’t get it again until the late 16th century. So queen Elizabeth had a godson and her godson, her favorite godson was sir John Harrington. He was an author. He was very inventive of really funny guy. And he had the idea of having a flushing toilet from a tank of water that would be placed above the toilet. And in 1596 he wrote under the pen name my Zack HMOs, which translates to hater a filth. He wrote all this out. His invention in a booklet called metamorphosis of Ajax. So men of metamorphosis of course means changing, transforming, and Ajax represents, well, I had Jakes was the Elizabethan slang for a toilet. So metamorphosis of Ajax is kind of like transformation of a Jake’s right. Pretty funny. So he installed his new style toilet in his own mansion.
He also presented one to queen Elizabeth and he also gave one to Robert sessile. But the idea never actually became popular. And it’s probably because Harrington’s toilet didn’t actually do a complete job. The waste still just dropped into a pit, which the pit still had to be dealt with, right. So it really wasn’t that much different than the normal way. And it wasn’t until the Victorian times when the unfortunately named or perhaps it’s only become unfortunate. Thomas crapper won a Royal appointment to install flushing toilets at Sandringham and that is the point at which modern style toilets flushing into drains became the common thing. So Harrington’s toilet was just a nice little flush that came from a a tank of water above the toilet and would wash everything away, but it would just wash it into a pit that still someone had the job of having to, to handle that. Um, clean that out.
something else that the Tudors gave us is forks. So up until the very, very late Elizabethan early Stewart period, people ate their meals with spoons and knives and their fingers. This is actually one of those kinds of ways to dispel myths that table manners were awful and people were filthy because people actually ate with their fingers. So it was very common that you would have a bowl to wash your hands with. You were very careful about not taking food from other people where other people had reached because everybody understood that they were eating with their own fingers in their own saliva was getting on it and everything like that. So they were very careful about it. Right. So forks were used in kitchens for like big giant kind of almost skewers that you would see for fishing food out of cooking pots and things like that.
But at the actual table, people would cut up their solid food with their knives and then eat it with their fingers. And in 1608, a world traveler, Thomas Korea, he was traveling through Europe and he actually made it all the way to India where he would later die, um, of dysentery. But he was traveling through Italy and he wrote, I observed a custom in all those Italian cities and towns through the, which I passed that is not used in any other country that I saw in my travels. Neither do I think that any other nation of Christendom doth use it, but only Italy, the Italian, and also most strangers in Italy do always at their meals use a little fork when they cut their meat for a while with their feeding knife, which they hold in one hand, they cut the meat out of the dish.
They fast in their fork, which they hold in the other hand upon the same dish. So that whatever he be, that sitting in the company of any others at meal should an advisedly touched the dish of meat, his fingers from which all of the table do cut. He will give the occasion of a fence onto the company as having transgressed the laws of good manners in so much that his error shall be at least browbeaten, if not represented in words. This form of feeding I understand is generally used in all places of Italy. Therefore, it’s being for the most part made of iron or steel and some silver, but those are used only by gentlemen. The reason of this curiosity is because the Italian cannot by any means in juror to have his dish touched with fingers. Seeing all men’s fingers are not a Lake.
Clean here upon, I myself thought good to imitate the Italian fashion by this fork cutting of meat. Not only while I was in Italy, but also in Germany and oftentimes in England since I came home. Being once quipped for that frequent use of my fork by a certain learning German. A familiar friend of mine, one M Lawrence Whittaker, who in his Merry humor doubted not to call me at the table first offer for only using a fork at feeding, but for no other cause. So we have Thomas Korea bringing forks to England. There’s actually a very interesting book, I’ve talked about it on this podcast before called consider the fork, which goes through the history of the world basically in kitchen items. And it talks about how the fork was first used in Italy as a way to handle pasta because you wouldn’t have been able to eat spaghetti really without pasta.
So it talks about how all of these different utensils evolved out of the sorts of foods that are natural or are indigenous to each particular country. So if you want to know more about forks and kitchen utensils, pots and earthenware and all kinds of stuff like that, you should definitely read. Consider the Fort and I’ll put a link to it in the show notes and something else that the English had actually thought that forks were dangerous. They were worried that you might cut your mouth. Also, they were worried about having your forgives to spear dishes from shared plates because they were worried that the saliva was going to spread and that you were gonna kind of contaminate each other’s foods. But by the end of the 17th century, forks were common in England, especially amongst the nobility and royalty. So we have forks coming to us in the very lead tutor, early Stuart period.
Something else industrial that the tutors gave us is the knitting machine. William Lee, he lived from 1563 to 1614 he was an English clergyman and he invented the first stocking frame knitting machine in 1589 and it was actually the only one used for centuries and it’s principle still remains in use. So he developed the machine supposedly because a woman that he was courting showed more interest in knitting than in him. Or alternatively, it said that his wife was a very slow knitter. His first machine created a course wool for stockings. He was refused a patent by queen Elizabeth. And then he built an improved machine that increased the number of needles per inch from eight to 20 and produced a silk of very fine texture. The queen said she wasn’t going to give him a patent. Her concern was actually for the employment of the kingdoms, hand knitters.
She was worried that people were basically going to be automated out of jobs, which is something that we think about nowadays a lot, right? See, the parallels are so scary. So the queen said to him, thou Amos high masterly consider that what the invention could do to my poor subjects, it would assuredly bring them to ruin by depriving them of employment and thus making them beggars. And most likely she was being lobbied by the Hosers Guild and they were afraid that intervention would make the skills of its artisan members obsolete. So then he entered into a partnership agreement with a man called George Brooke. But George Brooke was unfortunately arrested on a charge of treason. And he was killed in 1603 so then Lee moved to France. He took nine work men and nine frames along with him and he found more support in France where Henry the fourth actually gave him a patent.
So he began his stocking manufacturer in urine and there he prospered until Henry was assassinated. He tried working some deals out with other people. Nobody really was supportive of this, like a lot of inventors. He wound up dying kind of in poverty in 1614 and then his brother carried on trying to build the support for his machines and eventually it took off. And there were kind of two major knitting centers, one in London and one in nodding him. And during the 18th century as the industrial revolution started to take off, we see a lot more support of his knitting machine. So the knitting machine, 1589 so a couple of months ago I did an episode on clocks and how clocks were changing and also then how that altered the way people saw time and the way we interact with time. Right. And one of the side effects of the changes in the, the way the mechanisms were becoming smaller was that people could start to put clocks on wrists or in pocket watches as well.
So throughout the 16th century then people were evolving in the way they were building clocks and they started to use brass and bronze and silver rather than iron. This made it lighter. And then in the 1540s the Swiss watch industry kind of came into being because John Calvin banned people from wearing jewelry. So then jewelers actually started to learn another craft, which was watch making. And then those watches made their way back to England where they were luxury goods. So Elizabeth the first actually was presented with the first risked clock in England. Hers had an alarm on it, which scratched her finger when it went off, which was really kind of funny. So women tended to wear a wrist watches more and men would wear pocket watches. And that was because men were doing the harder work and were more apt to get dirty and having their watches get dirty, which they wouldn’t have wanted to have happen.
So they would wear these pocket watches, which they could put in their pocket then, but women weren’t necessarily doing the hard work that was dirty and so they would wear wristwatches. So that’s why it developed that women would wear a, and men would have pocket watches. Something else that changed for the tutors was chimneys. So in a house in medieval England, you probably would just have a hole in the ceiling to let out the smoke. But the room itself would have been very smoking because it wasn’t doing a particularly good job. It would have been very dark. And then if it rained, of course it’s possible the rain would come in. So these were really inefficient. So Romans did have chimneys, but they used round pipes and it was really expensive. It wasn’t easy. So most people just had, of course these holes, like I said, but the tutor architects began using square chimneys and they would line it with fireproof clay and this would cut down on the fires in the home and actually make things more comfortable.
You could have the heat reflected back in, you could have the smoke go up easier. So it made everything much better. Rooms themselves became smaller in order to take advantage of the heat that was created by these fireplaces. So before you would just have the, you know, we think about like main halls, one big room that had the fire in the center. Now you would have smaller rooms that had fires up against the wall in a fireplace with heat reflecting back and it would make everything just so much more comfortable, so much warmer and so much clearer with less smoke. Something else, which is domestic is you know, you think about these tutor portraits that have these really high colors. People were wearing these really high collars. There’s one I think about, it looks like the woman must have stretched her neck about two feet to be able to fit with this ruffled color.
The reason these became popular was suddenly you can make fabric stiff and the thing that made fabric stiff was the invention of starch. So as early as 4,000 BC, there’s references of Egyptian to pirates being stuck together with a starch adhesive. And in one 70 BC, keto actually described the Romans having a process for separating starch from green. By three 12 a D there’s a record of starts showing resistance to ink penetration in Chinese papers. So this is something that people were already kind of aware of, but by the 16th century, people started using starch to stiffen their clothing and it became a fashion to have very starchy, stiff callers. It was also something that the Nobles would use it. It’s interesting to see these kinds of societal changes. This is a period where the merchant’s arising, there’s a new middle-class, there’s a new sense of the quality of class fluidity during this period that you could start on, you know, as almost a peasant and be able to rise much more quickly and easily than you ever could before.
Well, that also then leads the Nobles to be feeling kind of threatened and like their way of life is under attack. And suddenly it’s no coincidence that at that period you start to get these really giant collars and really ruffled, um, ruffled colors that would go way out. And it was almost a way of separating themselves literally. Cause you couldn’t get that close to Nobles who were wearing these huge colors. They would stick out too far. So it was this need for personal space that was reflected in fashion and I just love that kind of stuff, right? Seeing how society is reflected in, in fashions and in these sorts of inventions and things like that. So we have starch, we have very huge stiff colors and I’ll put some portraits in the show notes as well for this episode. And actually if you want to go to the show notes, the URL is going to be England casts.com/inventions okay.
So englandcast.com/inventions is where you can get all the show notes for this. So something else that I wouldn’t necessarily call an invention though people often do is the theater. So before I actually, I did an episode, I did a series on Elizabethan theater several years ago. So I’ll link again to that in the show notes too, but before this time people would occasionally see Mummers plays or they would see, you know, people traveling minstrels, things like that. Those players were often sponsored by a noble person at court. They had the sanction to be able to travel around and, and that’s how you would see plays. But in the 1570s the first purpose built theaters opened in London, so we start to get places like the theater, the curtain, the globe where you can enjoy plays. They were hollow circles with the stage at one end and an open space at the center for the cheap tickets and then galleries all around.
These plays were designed for everybody. They were incredibly popular. You could play just a few pennies to be in the open space. There’s statistics that on a Sunday afternoon, as many as 10% of Londoners would go to a theater, they were usually outside the city limits itself, which is why you see the globe and Southern and other places where like in his LinkedIn and other places just outside the actual city walls and they weren’t under the same kind of jurisdictions as the city itself and so people would make their, their little walks out. It was a fun day out to get outside of the city on a Sunday and go see these plays. But of course the one difference is that there were no women on stage so the boys would act the parts of women all the way for another hundred years or so. It wasn’t until the later Stewart period that women actually started appearing in theaters as well.
Something else that the tutors gave us is tennis. Tennis was invented in tutor England. You know there’s that famous scene from the tutors where Henry is playing tennis with Charles Branden. Tennis itself was originally developed in France, but it was more similar to handball and then the tutors used kitchen sieves, which is the great, great, great, great, great grandfather of the tennis racket. Henry loved the sport and he put in a tennis court at Hampton court. And then there are two other things I want to just mention in passing because I’ve actually done episodes on them before. And the first is the shopping mall, which I talked about and that was with Thomas Gresham. And the thing that I love about Gresham’s shopping mall, which still exists today, it has luxury shops in it. The Royal exchange was that when he first had this idea to have one place where you could go to multiple shops at one time, he pissed, started pitching it to vendors and to various owners, business owners and people were a little bit kind of not sure about it.
He gave them really cheap rent to entice them to come in for the first year and he wasn’t filled up yet. So he had as his main opening day, he had a big celebration. Elizabeth the first actually came to see this big shopping mall and the story that I really love about this is because he didn’t have all of the stores filled yet. He had to stay a couple of steps ahead of Elizabeth continually putting fresh things in each shot to make it look like all of the shops were filled. And he probably had people kind of ready. There was an assembly line kind of passing things down. So Elizabeth would stop in one shop and while she was looking at this stuff in one shop, he’d be moving things from the shop before and do a couple shops ahead so that she always felt like she was looking at new and different shops.
So he had to do some clever merchandising to make it look like it was different things. But the shopping mall caught on and within another couple of years it was filled up and you know, all of his spots were rented out. But I just think that’s such a funny story. I can imagine him kind of scrambling trying to, to get these shops filled up with items before Elizabeth arrived. And then the other thing is sugar and I actually just did an episode on sugar recently, but the, the tutors loved sugar so much that they would make these confection Aries, which are the precursors to the modern wedding cake. So they would make these beautiful scenes with sculptures made out of sugar and it was just a, you know, a wonderful thing to look at a feast for the eyes. And Thomas Woolsey loved having these. He would give them as gifts to people.
So again, if you go to England, cas.com/inventions I’ll have a link to my episode on sugar that I did recently, which has all kinds of pictures of that too. Those are some of the inventions that the tutors gave us. So instead of a book recommendation this week, I’m going to do a TV recommendation. There was a documentary on a couple of, about 15 years ago or so called what the tutors did for us. It’s a 2002 BBC documentary. It was a four part documentary that looked at all different kinds of aspects of life and the legacy that the tutors gave us. And it talks about a number of these different sorts of inventions. So thank you so much for listening and I will be back in a couple of weeks. Remember to get your tutor kits again, the show notes for this episode are englandcast.com/inventions Thank you so much for listening and I will talk with you again soon. Bye. Bye.
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Heather Teysko is the creator, writer, and producer of The Renaissance English History Podcast,  the original Tudor history podcast, started in 2009. She's been writing about history online for over 25 years, since her first site on Colonial American history became number one in history on Yahoo in 1998. In 2019 she created Tudorcon, which is now a yearly event, in addition to writing books, and running TudorFair.com - a whimsical Tudor Merch shop. She has been passionate about Tudor England since she first read Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII 20 years ago, and subsequently moved to London after college to spend her time immersed in Tudor history.