A look at daily life for Tudor women. So I’ve done episodes that are like a day in the life of. I did A Day in the Life in London, A Day in the Life in 16th Century Cambridge, a day in the life of different types of people and the one comment that always comes back to me which is totally valid is that it’s all stuff that men are doing and that is true.
There’s a reason for that because of course, men were doing things that went in the record so women were not. Nobody was writing until later on towards the end of the 16th century, or beginning of the 17th century when there were like household books and books about how to keep your household, things like that. People weren’t really writing very much in the record about what women were doing.
Women weren’t at guild meetings that were being recorded. Women weren’t at parliament which where a lot of records come from. Women weren’t starting businesses doing things that would have been recorded. So it’s kind of one of those real missings from history that we don’t have. These very clear records of what women were doing that during that time. We do start to get later on.
We’re going to talk about letters. We just get a picture from letters that women were writing and especially as literacy improved. That is one of the beautiful things about Protestant Reformation was and I say this as an Episcopalian, but it doesn’t matter. The effect that it had was to create more literacy. A literacy boom that combined with the printing press. It’s one of those really beautiful little serendipitous things that happen in history.
We’ve got the printing press and the Protestant Reformation with its emphasis on having a direct relationship with God, and having the Bible in the vernacular, having people being able to read the Bible directly, that leads to this huge boom in literacy that we didn’t have before.
So again, by the end of the 16th century we start to get more letters we start to get diaries, things like that that we don’t have in the beginning. So we’re going to talk about all that and more this month on Women’s History Month. Today we are going to talk a little bit about a day in the life of typical Tudor women looking at a more lower class peasanty sort of woman and noblewomen and how their days diverged.
Of course, there were these vastly different strata of society, but one thing that’s pretty cool that we do see during this period that I think makes it very interesting is the rise of these merchant middle class that we hadn’t seen before. In the medieval period, it was surfs and nobles. There were some but not a lot in the middle class and that’s one thing we really start to see in the Tudor period, is this rise of this middle class.
But the social hierarchies of course, deeply influenced the lived experiences of the women themselves from the regal chambers of the noblewomen to the humble hearts of the peasants.
So let’s talk about morning routines. If you have watched anything like The Crown or Downtown Abbey or anything like that, you know that the noble would wake up with the maid opening the curtains saying “Oh, good morning!”, and the maids would have been there ready to assist with any kind of elaborate morning rituals that the noblewomen had.
For both noblewomen and peasant women, no matter whether you’re later with Elizabeth in the Protestant period or earlier with Henry VII when everything was still Catholic, prayers would have been the first order of business. So no matter what class you were, you wake up and you start with your prayers because of course, these rituals through the day kept people rooted. And of course, there was this intertwining with daily life with ritual observance of religion and the different religious practices. So that would have been the first order of business.
For noblewomen, the process of dressing was an art in itself. You would have had these layers of garments with intricate laces. They would have had to have been kind of tied into them. It was a process. Contrastingly, a peasant woman would have greeted the day with the crow of the rooster. Their morning devoid of any leisure as they plunged right into the day’s demands after their morning prayers.
Their homes, often simple one room cottages buzzed with activities as they stoked the hearth, prepared the meals, and tended to the animals, all before the sun fully made it into the sky. The absence of maids or servants in their world, meant that their hands were responsible for every task, from mending garments to kneading bread. Their routines shaped by necessity and resilience going into household management.
For noblewomen, the household was a place where they governed, they ruled it, demanded astute management skills. Kind of like running a small village. These women would have been like the conductors of a symphony orchestra with all of these different servants each with their own very specific roles.
Their days were punctuated with things like meal planning for feasts and even intimate gatherings. There would have been a lot of entertaining as part of their life lives. So they would have spent a lot of time planning the meal, planning the shopping, planning things like that.
Social gatherings of course, weren’t just leisure activities but they were strategic platforms for alliances and displays of status and wealth. Each event carefully orchestrated to reflect the family’s prestige.
Peasant women in their own domain faced different sort of challenges. Their homes lacking in grandeur were still the centers of relentless activity. The management of their household meant that they had to make do with limited resources to provide for their families. They were cooking, cleaning, child-rearing and that was interspersed with the rhythms of agricultural life. Their responsibilities extending beyond the threshold of their house, into the fields and the markets where they contributed to the family sustenance.
Work responsibilities. Noblewomen’s roles extended into the realms of estate management especially. Noblewomen would be at home a lot while their husbands were at court. So they had to know how to manage the estate. They also ran charitable endeavors. Their influence would quietly shape the political and the religious landscape of their area of their time.
Their job while their husband was away in London at Parliament or at court, was to really keep their status in their home area, to keep everything running, to make sure their reputation was as good as always, to make sure no power was lost, everything like that. So they really had a lot of responsibility especially when the husband was away.
It makes me think we see these themes especially think about Women’s History Month when men went away to fight in wars, I’m thinking World War I and World War II like Rosie the Riveter, the we-can-do-it woman, that women would take on these roles that that were traditionally men’s roles while the men were away.
Then the men would come back and there must have been this feeling of like “I mean, I can manage your estate as good as you can”. I look at how more 20th-century women had dealt with that and how that led to the women’s movement and everything, different waves of feminism and I just wonder what it was like for them, for those noblewomen.
If they spent 6 months or a year managing the estate, keeping everything running while the husband was at Parliament, at court and then the Lord comes back and he’s like “All right, I’m here. I’m back. I’m in charge,”, and that must have been a weird dynamic for them don’t you think? It must have been a little weird.
Some of these women then would be patrons of art, of education using their resources to support monasteries, hospitals, scholars, weaving their legacy into the fabric of society. Peasant women on the other hand, their hands are etched by their hard labor they engaged in. The essential work of agriculture or whatever trade their husband was in.
Of course, they would be helping their husband. If their husband was a baker or anything like that, they would be right in there helping. Their work was directly tied to the land’s yield to the yield of their family.
Markets or arenas where they showcased their produce and their goods, from fabrics to ales, their entrepreneurial spirit, a vital undercurrent to the economy despite the constraints of their class, their contributions were no less significant sustaining and enriching the community with their labor and crafts.
Well moving on to the afternoon activities for noblewomen, their afternoons were often reserved for leisure for the pursuit of personal interests in their tapestry-lined grand chambers and their grand homes, they would do embroidery which was a very valued skill that would allow them to express their creativity while also producing beautiful works that they could give as gifts or use in the household.
They would play music on the loot or the virginals, some even composed their own pieces. Many of them would then also read literature ranging from chivalric romances to religious texts. These afternoons were also the perfect opportunity to host or attend a social gathering where they could engage in conversation with their fellow noblewomen, exchange news and solidify alliances within their social circles.
Contrastingly for a peasant woman, her afternoon was pretty much just like the morning with work in the fields and at home and in her husband’s trade. The division between work and leisure was very blurred as their responsibilities to their families and communities persisted. They might spend their time tending to the vegetable gardens feeding the livestock, finishing up the day’s agricultural work.
In some cases, they would engage in communal work such as helping with a neighbor’s harvest or participating in the village maintenance despite the hard work. There was a sense of camaraderie and mutual support within these communities.
Now let’s talk about their education and skills briefly. The chasm between the education of a noblewoman and a peasant woman was of course huge. Noblewomen had access to tutors who taught them not only literacy but also languages such as French and Latin, essential for communication within and beyond England’s borders. They were also instructed in rudimentary mathematics, because remember they had to manage the estate while their husbands were gone so they actually did know some math.
They also learned some of the arts like we talked about, playing musical instruments, dancing, painting, all of these were things that noblewomen were schooled in if they were lucky enough to have those tutors, if their family provided them for them which most of them probably would because they wanted to have an educated daughter like that who could be a good partner for her future husband.
Peasant women on the other hand, they were educated in practicality and in survival. For them schooling was very rare, instead they would learn essential skills from their mothers and from their communities. Herbalism for treating family ailments, weaving, sewing, clothing repair, agricultural knowledge to support the family.
Their education was not written in books but pass down through generations in oral traditions and hands-on experiences. We’re going to talk a lot also this month about marriage and family life. We talked a little bit about marriage last month during love month, we’re also going to talk about it more.
Marriage in Tudor England vary dramatically across social strata. For noblewomen, marriages were generally arranged. They would marry early or at least be betrothed early to strengthen political alliances, to improve the family’s social standing. These marriages were negotiated by families. They involve intricate dowries or contracts.
Love was a secondary consideration if considered at all, with many noblewoman meeting their husbands for the first time at the altar. Peasant women still faced societal pressures but they had a lot more agency in choosing their partners, often marrying for Love or practical partnership. Their marriages were simpler affairs focused on mutual support and shared labor, of running a household and farm. Dowries were still exchanged but were very modest, often consisting of livestock, land rights or household goods.
Moving into the evening, evenings for noblewomen were times of refinement and entertainment. Of course the main meal would have been held earlier but they would still have a dinner. A lot of times, they would be hosting people. They would have entertainment, mass, showcasing their wealth and the wealth of the household. The household would probably gather for prayers before enjoying the evening entertainment such as dances, plays, or musical performances, often with guests from neighboring estates.
In contrast, a peasant woman’s evening was focused on family and community. After their simple dinner they might gather around the fire for storytelling or singing folk songs or just sharing the day’s news with each other. These moments though humble were vital for maintaining the social fabric of the village offering a rare chance for leisure and bonding in their labor-intensive lives.
Let’s talk about the challenges and hardships that the Tudor women had depending on which class they were in. Tudor women irrespective of their class still faced formidable challenges. So childbirth was something that definitely did not discriminate with limited medical knowledge and high maternity mortality rates.
Legal rights also for women were minimal. Their identities and properties subsumed under those of their fathers and husbands. This was true whether you were a noblewoman or you were the poorest peasant woman.
Societal expectations confined women to roles that limited their autonomy and silence their voices in the public arena yet these women became masters at the soft power, finding ways to influence their families and their communities behind the scenes within the constraints of the period.
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 30 years ago, and subsequently moved to London after college to spend her time immersed in Tudor history (how exciting when she got to interview Alison for the first time!). In addition to history, she is passionate about travel, and has lived in 3 countries and 4 states (not counting her perpetual state of confusion), and her family (who help her host her YouTube channel occasionally).
