The Tudor period

1485 - 1603 - largely the 1500s (16th century)

START: In 1485 Henry Tudor defeated Richard III in battle to become King Henry VII.

END: In 1603 Queen Elizabeth died, the last of the Tudor family to rule England.

Tudor monarchs with the dates

they reigned:

Henry VII 1485 - 1509

Henry VIII 1509 - 1547

Edward VI 1547 - 1553

Mary I 1553 - 1558

Elizabeth I 1558 - 1603

And have a look what happened to St Andrew's church.

The death of Richard III by Justo Jimeno

Henry Tudor - Won

Richard III - Nil

On 18th August 1485 King Richard III left Nottingham Castle with his army to meet the invading army of Henry Tudor. The Battle of Bosworth took place near Market Bosworth in Leicestershire on 22nd August.

It was all change for some people.

After Richard III was killed and Henry Tudor was crowned king, life for some of the rich lords and ladies of England changed dramatically.

🙂 It all depended whether they had supported

the winning side or the losing side. 🙁

Sir John Scrope was Lord of the Manor in 1485. Who did he support?

Click here to go to Lords of the Manor during the Times of the Tudors.

Langar and Barnstone have always been about farming.

Life on the Farm

However,

there was no change for ordinary people in Tudor times.

90% of the people in Tudor England lived in the country-side working on farms. Farm life meant long hours and hard work from dawn till dusk.

From the 1580s the weather grew worse and harvests failed (1586 was particularly bad), leading to hunger and unemployment. There were also outbreaks of the plague which killed many people – Nottinghamshire suffered especially in 1592 and 1605.

Work in the open fields - day after day after day after day

Open fields farmed in strips from John P McKay 'A History of Western Society Since 1300'

The picture shows an imaginary village →

surrounded by three large open fields divided into strips.

People rented strips of land in each field from the lord of the manor. The lord also owned strips in the fields and tenants had to work on his land for no pay.

The priest of the village church owned land. And villagers also had to pay one tenth of what they produced to the church.

Everybody planted the same crops -

Field 1: Planted with barley, oats, peas or beans in spring.

Field 2: Fallow with nothing planted. This field was used by all the villagers to pasture their animals. Livestock would also be let onto the other fields after harvest.

Field 3: Wheat or rye planted in autumn.

The fields at Langar were called Town Field, Middle Field and North Field.

Nobody knows exactly where the fields were, but ● Town Field was probably in-between Langar and Barnstone, ● North Field was north of Langar on the Bingham Road where Northfields Farm is now and ● Middle Field was somewhere in the middle!

For more information on open field farming, go to The Middle Ages.

Livestock

In Tudor times some farmers kept sheep for their wool, milk and meat.

Cattle (oxen) were kept as working animals to pull ploughs and carts - they were stronger than horses which were kept by wealthy people to ride. Cows were also kept for milk.

But pigs were the most popular animal with almost every family keeping one.

Pigs in Tudor times were very much like wild boars.

You've gotta have a pig!

Pigs did not need much looking after. They eat pretty much anything and in autumn they were let out onto the fallow field or into the woods to feed themselves.

Pigs were killed at the beginning of winter and all of a pig's body was used. Nothing was wasted. To preserve it the meat was salted in a barrel or hung in the rafters to smoke. The offal was made into faggots, brawn, haslet and black pudding, the intestines were used to make sausages and the trotters used to make jelly, The bristles could be used for brushes, the skin for leather, and the bladder for a football. Glue was made from the bones and the fat was made into soap.

Everything was used except the squeal!

↓ Contemporary images of the work on a Tudor farm.

Click to enlarge the images.

Village houses

↑ In the Tudor times, houses in Langar and Barnstone were not clean and cosy. ↑

There was one main room in the house for cooking, eating and sleeping; the animals were kept in another room. There was a loft upstairs to keep the straw, hay and seeds for next year.

Houses were built as a wooden frame and the spaces filled with wattle and daub.

Very few new houses were built here in Tudor times. There was no woodland in this area so timber had to be brought from further away and was expensive.

People rented their house from the lord of the manor, but many lords did not look after the houses. People had to patch and repair and mend their houses for as long as they could.

There are no Tudor houses in Langar or Barnstone now - the oldest houses here date from the 17th and 18th centuries.

Weblink

Was this the worst job in history?Watch a video clip from the Channel 4 series, 'The Worst Jobs in History' as Tony Robinson fills a wall with wattle and daub using clay, straw and cow poo.

Hold your nose and click here.

The link takes you out of this site.

How the other half lived

People nowadays talk about 'the other half' - they mean the rich and wealthy.

In Tudor times (as now) it wasn't half at all - it was only 1%. In his book, ‘A Description of England’ William Harrison wrote in 1577:

'We in England devide our people commonly into four sorts:

gentlemen, citizens, yeoman and labourers.'

Gentlemen were members of the nobility with titles such as Duke or Earl or Lord. Although they were only 1% of the population, they owned almost all the land in the England.

Citizens were free people who lived in towns - often merchants or businessmen or people with trades such as potters, blacksmiths or leather workers.

Yeomen were farmers who owned their own land.

Labourers: 90% of the people were labourers and lived in the countryside working for other people on farms.

William Harrison also mentions the poor, people who had no way of earning money - orphans, old people, the sick and injured. Their lives were utterly miserable; they depended on hand-outs from wealthier people or from the church or parish. In Tudor England about a third of the population was poor.

The Scrope family of Langar Hall were 'the other half'.

The Scrope family

Members of the Scrope family (pronounce it as 'scroop') were members of the gentry. Lords of the manor of Langar and Barnstone (and many other places besides), they were wealthy and powerful people who were involved with the king and the government of England.

Langar Hall was first built in the late 13th century. A hundred years later Margaret Tibetot was the lord of the manor - a lady could be lord of the manor and was still called a lord! When Margaret married Sir Roger le Scrope in 1390, the couple rebuilt Langar Hall.

This is not Langar but nearby Wiverton Hall which was built about the same time.

John Leland visited Langar Hall in 1543; he was King Henry VIII's historian. He described the house as looking like a stone castle.

There were no wars in England in Tudor times, so the hall was not built like a castle for defence, it was to impress people.

Langer, a village wher hard by the chirch is a stone howse of the Lord Scropes

embatelid like a castel.

There are no pictures of Langar Hall at this time. The picture shows the oldest part of nearby Wiverton Hall which was built about the same time. It looks like a castle with battlements along the top of the building. Langar Hall may have looked like this.

The deer park at Langar is no longer there. This is Wollaton Hall.

Deer, deer!

There was a park stocked with deer. Deer parks dated from Norman times and were revived by Henry VIII who enjoyed hunting. Although deer parks were very expensive to create and to maintain, every wealthy lord felt he had to have one. It was the fashion.

For more on Langar Hall through the ages, go to Langar Hall.

For more on the Scropes, click to go to Lords of the Manor during the time of the Tudors.

The Chaworth family of Wiverton Hall

Langar church is famous for its tombs.

The Chaworth family were enormously wealthy and lived nearby at Wiverton Hall.

Their tombs are in the north transept of Langar church. Most people were buried in the churchyard with nothing to mark the spot. Tombs like the Chaworths were very very very expensive:

The oldest tomb commemorates George Chaworth of Wiverton Hall who died in 1521 and his wife Katherine who died in 1517.
A marble tomb with two recumbent (lying down) effigies (statues) of John Chaworth, wearing Tudor armour, who died in 1558, and his wife Mary Chaworth with their 15 children mourning around the base.
A white alabaster recumbent effigy of Sir George Chaworth, also wearing armour, who died in 1587. Effigies were brightly painted at this time. Although the paint faded long ago, you can still see some traces of colour.