Life in Elizabethan England

Elizabethan society was hierarchical, agrarian and religiously charged — but also creative, mobile and culturally rich. The contrast between the gentry in their grand new homes, the poor struggling under inflation and bad harvests, and the booming new world of theatre is the heart of this topic.

The Great Chain of Being

Elizabethans believed in a divinely-ordained social order:

• God → angels → king/queen → nobility → gentry → yeomen → labourers → poor → animals → plants.
• Each rank had duties to those above and below.
• Disorder threatened cosmic balance — hence rebellions were treason against God.

The nobility and gentry

• Peers (~60 families) — earls, barons. Inherited titles, large estates.
• Gentry (~16,000 by 1600) — knights, esquires, gentlemen. New wealth from monastic lands, trade, royal favour.

The gentry boomed in Elizabethan times:

• Land — bought up dissolved monastic estates; built grand houses.
• Education — sent sons to grammar schools, universities, Inns of Court.
• Politics — dominated Commons.
• Architecture — long galleries, glass windows, portraiture.
• Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire — built by Bess of Hardwick c.1590. "Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall."
• Burghley House, Lincolnshire — Cecil's seat.
• Longleat, Wiltshire — Sir John Thynne 1568.

These "prodigy houses" displayed wealth, education, and connection to the Queen (her arms appeared everywhere).

Women in Elizabethan society

Women's role was subordinate — but not invisible:

• Legal — couverture: married women had no separate legal identity. Husband owned property.
• Marriage — arranged by parents; dowry expected.
• Education — limited, usually domestic. Some upper-class women highly literate (Bess of Hardwick, Queen Elizabeth herself).
• Work — peasant women laboured in fields, looked after livestock, brewed ale. Spinsters spun.
• Authority — paradoxically, the Queen was a woman, complicating rhetoric of male supremacy.

Notable women:

• Elizabeth I — successful female monarch.
• Bess of Hardwick — built Hardwick Hall, accumulated huge estate.
• Mary Sidney — translator, patron of poets.
• Aemilia Lanyer — first English woman to publish original poetry.

The poor and Poor Laws

The 1590s were terrible: bad harvests (1594–98), war taxation, inflation. Vagrancy (wandering jobless poor) became a crisis.

Two categories of poor recognised:

• Deserving poor — too sick, old, young to work. Helped through alms.
• Sturdy beggars / vagrants — able-bodied who refused work. Punished.

Poor Laws:

• 1572 Vagrancy Act — branding, ear-boring for repeat vagrants; whipping.
• 1576 Poor Relief Act — towns to provide work for sturdy beggars.
• 1597 Poor Relief Act — overseers of the poor in each parish; rates levied.
• 1601 Poor Law (statute of Elizabeth) — landmark code, basis of poor relief until 1834. Each parish responsible for its own poor; relief for impotent, work for able-bodied, apprenticeships for orphans.

This system — locally funded poor relief — became the foundation of English welfare.

Education

• Petty schools — basic literacy for boys (and some girls) of moderate means.
• Grammar schools — Latin, Greek, classical authors. Established in towns. Shakespeare attended Stratford's.
• Universities — Oxford and Cambridge, expanding under Elizabeth.
• Inns of Court — legal training for gentry sons.

Education was gendered — boys far more likely to study Latin, girls to learn embroidery and music.

Leisure and entertainment

Rich and poor enjoyed different leisure:

Rich — masques, music, hawking, hunting, jousting, tennis, plays, ornate gardens.

Poor — football (rough village games), bear-baiting, cock-fighting, dancing, ale-houses, fairs.

Both enjoyed religious festivals (Christmas, Easter, May Day) and public executions (a form of theatre).

The flowering of theatre

The Elizabethan period is the great age of English drama:

• The Theatre (Shoreditch, 1576) — first purpose-built playhouse, by James Burbage.
• The Rose (1587), The Curtain (1577), The Swan (1595).
• The Globe (Bankside, 1599) — built by the Lord Chamberlain's Men using timber from the Theatre.
• Performances open-air, daylight, all-male cast (boys played female roles).

Playwrights:

• Christopher Marlowe — Doctor Faustus, Tamburlaine, The Jew of Malta. Killed in tavern brawl 1593.
• William Shakespeare — Stratford-born; Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Henry V, late tragedies.
• Ben Jonson — Volpone, The Alchemist.

Audiences:

• Groundlings — penny entry, stood in front of stage.
• Galleries — wealthy seated, paid more.
• Up to 3,000 spectators per performance.
• Often noisy, interactive.

Opposition:

• Puritans — saw theatre as immoral, a "school of vice".
• Plague closures — playhouses shut during outbreaks.
• Censorship — Master of the Revels licensed plays.

But Crown patronage protected theatre. Elizabeth herself loved performances at Court.

Continuity and change

• Continuity — hierarchy, gendered roles, religious calendar, agrarian poverty.
• Change — gentry expansion, prodigy houses, mass theatre, Poor Law system, growing London (200,000 by 1600).

By 1603, Elizabethan England was a society of glaring inequality — but also of unprecedented cultural richness.