Chapter 21
In This Chapter
● Appreciating Tudor ingenuity
● Marvelling at new ideas and inventions
● Bringing new discoveries back to England
Many people talk of the Tudor period as being the beginning of the modern world, at least in England. Things aren’t quite that clear cut, but the years 1485-1603 did witness a great number of new inventions and discoveries. Many of these weren’t just ‘firsts’ for the Tudor world; they were new arrivals that in some cases are still with us in one form or another, or which changed forever established ways of doing things.
This chapter highlights ten of the most significant and long-lasting Tudor ‘firsts’. So grab a coffee, and maybe a few tomatoes to nibble, and read on!
Sailing into the First Dry Dock, Portsmouth (1495)
The only way to repair ships in the Middle Ages was to careen, which meant tilting them by shifting the weight of cargo and/or guns so that the keel was out of the water for long enough to get the work done. This method was very dodgy - when they careened the Royal George (the British flagship) in 1782 it sank with a huge loss of life.
You could wait for a very high tide and drag a damaged ship as far onto the foreshore as possible and start work on it, but even then, water would still be present in the bilges and the hold, and carpenters would sometimes have to work waist-deep. The next problem was then to wait for another high tide before you could get the ship afloat again.
In 1495, a man called Robert Brygandine hit upon a solution to this problem. Working with the architect Sir Reginald Bray, Brygandine put the idea of building a dry dock to Henry VII. Because Henry was keen to build up his navy and Bray was the designer of the magnificent Henry VII Chapel in Westminster Abbey (see Chapter 2), this was a marriage made in heaven.
The first Portsmouth dry dock isn’t there any more, but if you’re visiting the Mary Rose (see Chapter 3) take a walk along to the Victory (Lord Nelson’s flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar) and you’ll be standing where the dock was built. It was made of wood and stone, with walls packed with earth. A ship could sail in, the gates were shut,and the water was then pumped out, with the gates keeping the sea back. The result? Carpenters and shipwrights could work in peace and in the dry.
Only royal ships could use this brilliant invention and it remained in use until 1623. It set Portsmouth up as the shipbuilding heart of the Royal Navy for centuries.
Building the First Printing Press in England, London (1500)
Setting up the first printing press in England was the brainchild of Jan van Wynkyn of Worth in Alsace, Germany who came to England either in 1476 or 1481. The pronunciation of Worth ended in a ‘d’ sound, which was handy for a printer, so he came to be known as Wynkyn de Word - cool or what?
Wynkyn worked for the printer William Caxton in Westminster, near the Abbey, and he became a rival to another printer, John Lettou. In 1495, Wynkyn took over Caxton’s print shop before moving to Fleet Street five years later.
Wynkyn is famous for more firsts than almost anybody. He was the first to use italic type in 1528 and the first to print music with type, working with Ranulf Higdon in the book Polychronicon as early as 1495. He was also the first to have a bookstall in St Paul’s churchyard, which became the centre of the English book trade.
The Tudor age was an age of patrons - you’d get nowhere without somebody powerful to open career doors for you - and Wynkyn’s patron was the clever, intellectual Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII.
The ‘father of Fleet Street’, as Wynkyn came to be known, printed 500 books that ran to 800 editions in his lifetime, providing cheaper books for the mass market. A lot of these books were religious, as you’d expect from a period
full of religious problems, but he also printed poetry and books for kids, with illustrations.
Wynkyn’s moveable type set the pattern for centuries of printing and his base in Fleet Street went on to make the place the newspaper capital of the world by the 19th century.
Publishing the First Cookery Book, London (1500)
One of Wynkyn’s rivals in the early London printing trade was Richard Pynson, who became royal printer to Henry VIII (so, successful as he was, eat your heart out Wynkyn de Word, because you didn’t get the top job!). All the key documents of Henry’s early reign were printed by Pynson.
Centuries later, in 2002, the Marquess of Bath was having a clear out of his huge library at the family home at Longleat, when he came across a book called The Boke of Cookery. He nearly threw it out. It turned out that his book is the only known copy of the work in the world, and it tells us a lot about the food of the Tudors.
A lot of Pynson’s book is about great feasts that earlier kings - Henry IV, Henry V and so on - enjoyed. This focus is as typical of ‘celebrity chefs’ then as now - getting as much recognition from the top brass as they can.
In 2006, two of the recipes from The Boke of Cookery were made in BBC TV’s Breakfast Show. ‘Pommes Moled’ is Apple Pudding. It’s got apples (!), rice, almonds, sugar, saffron, salt, nutmeg, cinnamon and ginger in it, and sounds scrummy! Another dish, ‘Saracen Bruet for Ten Messes’ (Turkish Stew), may sound a little bit un-PC today, but it’s a sort of goulash. Rabbit, partridge, chicken, red wine, cloves, mace, pine nuts, currants, ginger, sugar and cinnamon were thrown in (careful though, 21st century reader - this recipe may contain nuts!).
Playing the First Lottery in England (1569)
Defending a country was expensive. Navies and armies had to be paid, guns and other weapons made and maintained. And don’t get us started on the cost of fortifications! Rulers could raise extra cash from taxation, but people didn’t like taxes and might rebel rather than pay them.
So Queen Elizabeth’s government came up with a brilliant idea: Print some tickets (400,000 of them, to be precise) and get people to buy them. There was a guaranteed prize every time (bring it on!) that was usually silver plate or tapestry - what every young upwardly-mobile Elizabethan wanted. How could it fail? Adverts appeared all over the place on scrolls that showed the royal coat of arms and line-drawings of the prizes. As a bonus, people who bought tickets could also feel really good about themselves, because the money raised was for the ‘reparation of the havens [harbours] and strength of the Realm [country] and towards such other publique good works.’ Makes you proud to be an Elizabethan, doesn’t it?
And if you couldn’t afford a ticket, you could buy a share in one - a third or a sixteenth or whatever - sort of like today’s syndicates.
The idea was dreamt up in 1566 and the first draw took place three years later. By 1571, however, the idea was dropped - perhaps the world just wasn’t ready for lotteries.
Navigating with the First County Maps in England (1579)
In the 21st century, many people would struggle to find their way from A to B without their trusty satnavs, or at least without motorists’ gazetteers. While you’re zooming along in your car, local radio stations warn you of delays on motorways and large, lit signs remind you that ‘tiredness can kill’ and tell you to take a break.
Tudor travellers had no such gadgets and gizmos to help them on their way. Instead, they trusted to luck for most of the century, relying on appalling track-like roads and wooden sign-posts.
Then along came Christopher Saxton. He was the son of a Yorkshire farmer (or clothier - perhaps both), born about 1540. In 1570 he was commissioned by Thomas Seckford, Master of the Court of Requests, to draw maps of all thirty-four counties in England and Wales.
To create his maps, Saxton used a system of triangulation first used in the Netherlands forty years earlier; a Dutch expert, Remigius Hogenberg, worked with him. Italian technology helped to produce these maps - a new engraving technique had been developed there in the 1560s. Arty bits (which, sadly, we don’t use any more) like ships and sea-monsters were added later and each map was hand-coloured. When each map was finished, it was sent to Cecil
for approval. On some of these maps, which still exist in the official archive today, Cecil himself has written the number of troops he knew to be available in each area.
The man who paid for all this, though, was Thomas Seckford (the queen was superb at getting other people to fork out for her defence) but he did get his coat of arms on the maps, so he was happy. So was Christopher Saxton. The queen gave him a ten-year monopoly on all map-making in England and a nice little manor house at Grigston in Suffolk.
Behind all this activity was William Cecil (see Chapters 12-18), Queen Elizabeth’s chief adviser, who needed accurate maps for political reasons: rebels in the north, invading Scots, foreign armies landing on the coast, and other eventualities. Cecil needed to know where, how far, and how long, and where to locate the water supplies, the hills and the marshes.
There was one problem, though. There were no roads on Saxton’s maps; nobody thought it was necessary.
Writing with the First Shorthand System (1588)
In the year of the Armada (see Chapter 15) it was more vital than ever that state secrets were kept secret. Nobody was more aware of that than Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s spymaster, and it can’t be a coincidence that someone who knew him well was a man called Timothy Bright.
Bright was born in about 1551 near Sheffield and he graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge in 1569. He was actually a medical student and was studying in Paris in 1572 when Catherine de Medici launched her massacre of Protestants there (see Chapter 13). Terrified, he ran for safety to the house of the English ambassador, who happened to be Francis Walsingham, and a relationship was born.
As a doctor, Bright wasn’t very good. His time at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London was very undistinguished, even though he was one of the first to write about melancholy (depression) and its related medical conditions.
Perhaps because of his links with Walsingham, however, Bright went on to write Characterie: the Art of Shorte, Swifte and Secret Writing by Character and presented it to the queen in 1588. Like Pynson’s cookery book, only one copy of this books remains in existence - in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
Bright used a series of lines, circles and half circles as 538 symbols for words. Some letters were omitted from his alphabet, so, for example, his own name, Timothy, would have to be spelt with an ‘i’ at the end; he’d not included a ‘y’!
Bright may have intended to develop an international sign language but it never happened, and it’s possible that his shorthand system was used to record church sermons to be printed and published later and perhaps even the plays of Shakespeare and Marlowe.
Bright did better out of his shorthand system than he did in medicine. The queen gave him a monopoly to publish his system for fifteen years.
Inventing the First Knitting Frame (1589)
Some inventions were delayed because of their effect on existing systems - the knitting frame was one.
The inventor, William Lee, was an Anglican curate born in 1563 in Calverton near Nottingham, one of the most important of the textile areas in England.
He graduated from Christ’s College, Cambridge, twenty years later, intending to be an ordinary parish priest.
The story goes that Lee became furious with hand-knitting because his fiancee spent all her time making her own clothes and had no time for him! Outraged, he started to think up ways of speeding up the knitting process.
The original machine he came up with had eight needles to the inch. The result of this was coarse cloth, so he made modifications that included twenty needles to enable his machine to make fine cloth. By 1598, Lee was able to knit silk in this way too. He gave up the Church and focussed entirely on his invention, taking the frame (small enough to fit into a country cottage) to London to show to Baron Hunsdon and the court.
Queen Elizabeth was impressed, but in a very far-sighted and wise move, she turned down his application for a patent because she realised the harm his gadget would do to the hand knitters. James I felt the same when Lee tried again in 1603. Only the 18th century didn’t care, and by that time, it was all about mechanical power, profit and greed, and Lee’s knitting frame of two centuries earlier came into its own. The result? Finely-knit stockings, widespread unemployment and a working-class movement - the Luddites of the early 1800s - determined to destroy machinery in the forlorn hope of keeping their livelihoods.
Flushing the First Water Closet (1596)
Sir John Harington (1561-1612) is best remembered today as a courtier, poet, wit and general pain in the neck. He was born near Bath as the son of a courtier and he was the queen’s godson. She called him ‘Boy Jacke’ for the rest of her life. He went to school at Eton and university at King’s College,
Cambridge, getting his Master’s degree in 1581. He married well and became infamous at court for his risque poetry and naughty translations of Greek poetry which upset almost everybody.
Harington’s most famous gaffe was A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, called the Metamorphosis of Ajax, printed in 1596. Now, you probably don’t realise it, but you’ve just heard an Elizabethan joke (tell it at parties - it’ll be a riot!).
Ajax was a character in Greek Mythology, but jakes was a Tudor word for a toilet or privy. Good, eh?
Well, the queen didn’t think so and sent Harington ‘into the country’ (in other words, away from her) until he could behave himself. All this nonsense disguised the fact that Harington had indeed changed the privy for ever.
His ‘device’ (he never gave it a name) had a leather valve which opened and closed by levers and a cistern which flushed waste with clean water. It also had a stopper to prevent unpleasant smells from coming up from the cesspit below.
Now the queen was in two minds over this. She hated making decisions and Harington’s device gave her a problem. She liked it enough to have one installed in Richmond Palace, but probably didn’t use it because there was still no sewerage piping to carry waste away and because she was scared of the gurgling noise it made.
If the queen had approved, of course, flush loos would have become all the rage. Because she didn’t, Englishmen and women had to make do with chamber pots and holes in the ground for many years to come.
Nibbling the First Tomatoes in England (1597)
No, the Tudors didn’t invent tomatoes. They weren’t even the first people to import them from where they grew in central and south America. In fact, tomatoes in England nearly didn’t happen at all.
Tomatoes were found in 1519 by Hernando Cortez, the Spanish conquistador, in the garden of Montezuma (he of the ‘revenge’), the Aztec king. From there, tomatoes got back to Spain and then on to Italy. Since they were called pommi d’oro (golden apples) it’s likely they were the yellow variety.
When botanists gave names to all sorts of plants later on, the tomato was called Lycopersicon esculentum, which means ‘wolf-peach’, and that’s a clue to why Englishmen didn’t like them. The 2nd-century medical expert Galen had described what appeared to be a tomato fourteen centuries earlier, explaining that it contained a poison to kill wolves - hence the Latin name. Galen wasn’t very good but everybody thought he was, so the idea stuck.
One man who thought otherwise was John Gerard, a barber-surgeon who may have been the first man to grow tomatoes in England. In his Herbal of 1597 he wrote that tomatoes were grown in Spain and Italy, and this was probably reason enough to consider them poisonous. They were good, he said, for treating gout and ulcers, but other antidotes were better and had no side effects.
Gerard’s Herbal, like Galen’s writings, was highly influential, so it was nearly a century before tomatoes were welcomed with open arms by the English.
Drinking the First Coffee in England (1599)
Queen Elizabeth’s England was full of brave, even foolhardy adventurers who were prepared to risk their lives to find new worlds or at least grab the riches they held.
One of these adventurers was Antony Sherley (1595-1630). Sherley sailed on a completely unauthorized mission to Persia (today’s Iran and Iraq) to set up English trading posts and to get the shah (the Persian king) onside against the Ottoman Turks. William Parry, one of Sherley’s men, wrote the first account of coffee drinking in English:
‘They [the Turks; sit] drinking a certain liquor, which they do call Coffe, which is made of seede much like mustard seede, which will soon intoxicate the braine ...’
The Turks claimed it warmed them up when the weather was cold and was cleansing because it made them break wind!
A number of Jacobean explorers and travellers mention coffee and the first coffee-house in England was probably opened in Oxford in 1652. Whether Sherley ever actually ever brought any of the beans back for roasting in England is open to doubt - Elizabeth’s government made it clear he’d overstepped the mark with his Persian adventure and he was told not to come back.
He was certainly back by 1603, however, when he annoyed James I in one of the king’s many clashes with parliament. Sherley may or may not have been the first English coffee-drinker, but his arrest led to the vital change in the law which set up parliamentary privilege; an MP cannot be arrested just for speaking his mind.