What a Winter Night Was Like in Tudor England | 2.5 Hours of Tudor History for Sleep + Rain

A rainy Twelfth Night, the fifth of January 1576, in Chipping Campden, a real Cotswold wool town, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. You keep the household book for a woolman's family in a stone house on the High Street. You carry the Twelfth cake home from the baker through the rain, and the house keeps the last night of Christmas: the hall with its new chimney, painted cloths and pewter, brawn and mustard and shred pies, the wassail bowl of lambswool, the bean and the pea in the cake that make a King and Queen for the night, the curfew bell rung from the church tower, an old woman's story of the night she first came to the town, the old apple tree toasted in the garden, the fire covered and the doors barred as the bellman calls the hour. And a small mystery - why do the candle ends go missing every night? - is answered before sleep. Calm, true-to-life Tudor history, read softly over gentle rain. Sources: William Harrison, The Description of England (1577; ed. G. Edelen, Folger/Dover, 1994) - chimneys, beds and pillows, pewter for treen, glass windows Thomas Tusser, Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry (1573) - Christmas husbandly fare Ronald Hutton, The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (Oxford, 1996) - Twelfth Night, the bean and the pea, wassail and lambswool, orchard wassailing Ruth Goodman, How to Be a Tudor: A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Everyday Life (Viking, 2015) Alison Sim, The Tudor Housewife (Sutton, 1996) Historic England, list entries for Chipping Campden: Church of St James; Grevel House; Woolstaplers' Hall Christopher Whitfield, A History of Chipping Campden (Shakespeare Head Press, 1958) The Book of Common Prayer (1559) Andrew W. Tuer, History of the Horn-Book (1896) #HistoryForSleep #TudorEnglandHistoryForSleep #TudorEngland