Golden Age Elizabeth Flashcards
Key Arguments FOR a Golden Age
- Flourishing of education
- Growth of theatre
- Greater opportunities to enjoy leisure/pastimes
- Voyages of exploration and discovery
- Defeat of the Spanish Armada, combined with England’s rising status as a military and naval power.
- Increased government help and intervention for the poor
Key Arguments AGAINST a Golden Age
-Increase in poverty and vagabondage
On a lesser scale… opposition to theatre, the fact that educational opportunities did not increase for all and the idea that many of the Elizabethan entertainments were by modern standards, cruel and barbaric.
How did Elizabethans view their own society?
According to William Harrison’s 1577 book The Description of England, the population saw themselves as divided into four classes:
- Gentlemen: nobles, lords and gentry
- Citizens and burgesses in towns: merchants, master craftsmen and lawyers
- Yeomen: farmers who owned their own land
- The fourth sort: the working classes and unemployed
How did the nobility spend their leisure time?
There was greater opportunity to pursue leisure activities amongst all social classes, but some activities were enjoyed exclusively by the nobility and upper classes:
- ‘Drinking’ tobacco was an expensive hobby and treat for when money was not so scarce
- Sports: tennis, fencing and bowls
- Nobles employed household musicians, while the gentry bought madrigal songbooks and organised musical evenings.
Which activities were enjoyed by everyone?
- Celebrating of feast days such as Saints’ Days, Plough Monday, or Elizabeth’s accession day - a chance for dancing and drinking in the village
- Archery and fishing were popular at all levels of society
- All classes took part in hunting, except the nobility would more commonly hunt deer and the poor, rabbit.
What was the theatre like before Elizabeth’s reign?
- No theatres had been built for 1000 years
- Plays were popular, with groups of actors travelling around the country with acrobats, jugglers and minstrels… the plays performed however were usually from the Bible (miracle plays)
Opposition to the theatre?
- Some Elizabethans opposed the theatre because they thought it would encourage idleness, spread disease and create unrest
Puritans believed that theatres were the work of the Devil and the Lord Mayor of London asked the Privy Council to control the theatres, although the Privy Council only shut them down in times of plague. - The Queen herself enjoyed theatre, but was worried that audiences might hear political or religious messages which criticized her government - from 1572, censorship was introduced and all acting companies had to possess a royal licence.
Did educational opportunities improve? Literacy
- Although most people were still too poor to go to school, by the end of Elizabeth’s reign the percentage of men who could read had jumped from 10%-25%.
- For women the number rose from 1-10%
- Majority of gentry and yeomen were literate
- Underpinned by the printing press and availability of mass produced books for the first time
Did educational opportunities improve? Public schools
- Earliest independent schools (Winchester and Eton) were set up
- These were fee paying boarding schools set up for ruling class boys.
- All lessons were taught in Latin and the curriculum combined methods of the grammar schools with an emphasis on conduct, courtesy and etiquette necessary to produce gentlemen destined for court
Did educational opportunities improve? Against
- Most people still too poor to send their children to school
- Upper and middling classes benefitted, whilst the poor did not
- Lower class schooling did not change at all: the only hope you had of being educated if lower class was being taught to read by your master at your place of work
- Additionally only boys usually got a formal education. Girls remained at home.
Why did poverty increase? Harvests and changes to farming
- Everyone depended on food grown by farmers, but farmer were at the mercy of the weather.
- During Elizabeth’s reign, there were two really bad sequences of harvests, in the early 1570s and the mid-1590s.
- One bad harvest caused food prices to rise and shortages. Three + years meant thousands of deaths
Why did poverty increase? Unemployment in industries
- The only important industry in the sixteenth century was the cloth trade, where English woollen cloth was exported to Europe. This had provided work for many spinners and weavers. When the cloth trade collapsed in the 1550s
thousands of people lost their jobs.
Why did poverty increase? The closure of the monasteries
- Until the 1530s, the monasteries provided food and shelter for the homeless and unemployed.
- However, they were closed down by Henry VIII in the late 1530s. This Dissolution of the Monasteries meant that there was less help for the poor, and many of them were left to wander the roads or drift to the towns in search of work.
Why were Elizabethans so worried about poverty?
- Very religious society: laziness/idleness was a sin against God
- Exaggerated writings e.g. by Thomas Harman made people believe there were more vagabonds than there were and stirred up panic
- Landowners had a duty of care, and took this seriously, but struggled to meet this with increased
Why was there so much overseas exploration? Conflict with Spain
The growing wealth and power of Catholic Spain was based on the gold and silver mines of Spanish territories in the New World, mainly Mexico and Peru. The English desire to attack and plunder these territories increased as relations with Spain grew worse in the 1580s and the English fears of a Catholic invasion grew. English explorers such as John Hawkins and Francis Drake, took no notice of trade restrictions on Spanish territories, especially once it was clear that Spain was no longer England’s ally.
