Issues with Inventories
The minutae of detail sometimes present in Probate inventories makes them a useful tool for helping to understand ordinary life. However the interpretation of such information is often imaginative and without due consideration of any limtations of that evidence. In this article I hope…
The Practice of Witchcraft
Witchcraft is an important theme in Elizabethan England, legal accounts of witchcraft are abundant, the church saw it as a major problem and devoted a fair bit of energy towards it and both popular and more intellectual writings and plays deal with it repeatedly….
Re-Enactment – Is it still a Hobby ?
This article was originally written by Mark on behalf of The Tudor Group for the magazine Echoes Of The Past as a discussion paper on the future of re-enactment. It is reproduced here by kind permission of Mark Goodman and Echoes Of The Past….
A Counter Blast to Machine Sewing – Comments by a 16th Century Tailor
This article was originally written by Mark on behalf of The Tudor Group for the magazine Echoes Of The Past. It was in response to comments about the impracticality of attempting to accurately reproduce period clothing in re-enactment and the preference for machine sewing…
The Elizabethan Trayned Bandes
The Trayned Bandes had 3 general components; The trained bands; The untrained men and The pioneers. All men between 16 and 60 were elligible. The Trained bands were the chosen volunteers from the local community who would spend up to 2 days a month…
Money, Finance, Scams & Wheezes
Britain throughout the 16th century and long before was a money economy. The poorest being perhaps the most reliant on cash, having no land or other means of production with which to produce the necessities of life, wages and charity having to supply all….
Popular Medicine
Documentation As with modern Britain, Elizabethan Britain had many different providers of healthcare – Physicians, Apothecaries, Surgeons, Bonesetters, Midwives, Cunning men/ women, Keepers, Wives and Mothers. Some of these practiced medicine full time and others as a part time business, some were professionally trained…