A Night Inside a Wealthy Tudor Home | History for Sleep

It is early evening in Elizabethan England, around the year 1575. The last light is fading over the fields, and inside a gentleman’s manor house, candles are being carried through the darkening passages. The great hall fire is being built up for the night, and supper is nearly ready. The important guests have ridden home before dark. Now the mistress of the house is looking forward to the quiet comfort of her own chamber. Her home has carved oak paneling, Flemish wall hangings, silver on the cupboard and a featherbed worth more than many of the farms around it. Even so, every flame has to be paid for, every jug of water is carried up the stairs by hand, and the cold of an English October night slowly works its way through walls two feet thick. Tonight you will spend one whole evening and night inside a wealthy Tudor home. You will sit down to a candlelit supper of roasted capon and raised pies, sweetened with spices from the far side of the world. You will listen to the lute and the virginals by the fire. You will watch the house being locked, its fires covered and its candles put out one by one. Then you will undress at last, wash with warm rosewater, and settle into a curtained four-poster bed while the rain falls on the roof and the whole house goes quiet. Lie back, get comfortable, and drift off in the year 1575. Topics Covered in this video: How a wealthy Tudor family lit their home: beeswax, tallow and rushlights The cost of candles and why no house was ever fully lit Great halls, great chambers, long galleries and the move toward private rooms Heating with open hearths, firebacks and the new Elizabethan chimneys The servants of a gentry household and the work they did after dark The kitchen at evening: spits, bread ovens and covering the fire with a curfew What wealthy Tudors ate for supper, from manchet bread to pigeon pie Wine, beer, ale and hippocras Table manners, the salt cellar, carving and serving by rank The Tudor banquet course: marchpane, comfits and sugarwork After-supper music, embroidery, games and reading Elizabethan women’s clothing: smocks, bodies, farthingales, ruffs and French hoods Sumptuary laws and dressing by social rank #historyforsleep #sleephistory #tudorhistory #bedtimestories #tudor #boringhistory