Sometimes you read a book that, while interesting in its own right, sparks a whole train of thought on something only tangentially related. This is on

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2024-10-03 19:30:17

Sometimes you read a book that, while interesting in its own right, sparks a whole train of thought on something only tangentially related. This is one such, an overview of life in the Tudor world that offers an instructive comparison with contemporary class signaling and then, quite unexpectedly, also illuminates something about recent advances in artificial intelligence. It’s nothing the author intended, I’m sure, but one of the delights of history books (and especially of very practical histories like this one) is the light they cast on humanity as a whole. What are people like? How do they behave? What are our own versions of whatever seems strangest here? And, of course, what’s up with codpieces?

We’ve already met Ruth Goodman — reënactor, costume drama and museum consultant, and historian of Tudor England “as it was lived” — in my review of The Domestic Revolution. This book takes a similarly personal approach: she has actually done everything she describes, so she can explain things the historical record elides but that might be opaque to a modern audience. (If you were writing a book about daily life today, for instance, it’s possible that you would mention shoelaces, but you probably wouldn’t think to describe what a shoelace is, or how one is tied, which someone five hundred years in the future might well need explained.) Compared to The Domestic Revolution, though, How To Be a Tudor is simultaneously broader in scope and much more niche, covering nearly all the daily practicalities but with limited obvious appeal to anyone not already interested in early modern Britain. 1 But the appeal is, I promise, there.

When I originally set out to write this review, I was going to open with something like “obviously we all know that medieval and early modern Europeans put rushes on their floors, but what you may not know…” before it occurred to me that I should probably check whether that was actually true. So, like you do, I asked my friends, and since I got answers ranging from “yes of course, everyone knows that” to “what’s a rush?” I suppose I should first inform you that 1) a rush is an aquatic plant of the genus Juncus, sort of like a reed or a sedge, and 2) medieval and early modern Europeans put rushes on their floors. The Anglo-Norman word junchiere2 is first attested in 1170 and means “rush-strewn floor,” and there are records of rush purchases, payment for rush-strewers, and regulations on rush-selling (you have to bundle them before you bring them to the London wharfside for sale) throughout the period. They even appear in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, where Petruchio’s servant checks on the preparations for his master’s wedding by asking, “Is supper ready, the house trimm'd, rushes strew'd, cobwebs swept…?” But imagine trying to walk across a floor covered in vegetable matter in the sorts of long gowns that all Tudor-era women (and many men!) 3 wore; it would get caught up in the trailing fabric, wouldn’t it? And indeed, this is what happened with Goodman’s first experiment with strewing loose rushes, but she soon found that they performed very well when laid in bundles. At two inches thick, they form a consolidated layer and do not move around underfoot; at six inches thick, the floor is “genuinely comfortable to sleep on” (and the floor was of course where many people slept in the days before coal reshaped English life). After six months of living this way while filming Secrets of the Castle, she writes,