People hoped for love, but they stuck together to survive. “The unmarried man of 50 was as much a spare part and slight embarrassment as the unmarried woman of the same age,” Goodman writes. Although they certainly weren’t the equals of their husbands in status and power, Tudor wives were indispensable, and single people of both genders were considered incomplete.

Unless they were unusually wealthy, men and women simply couldn’t get by without pairing up.

The urban wives of shopkeepers and artisans were just as essential to their spouses in other ways.īefore industrialization, married couples, not individuals, formed the basic economic unit of society. No one could do them himself on top of tending the fields that occupied nearly every waking hour of the Tudor husband’s day. They’re elaborate, fiddly tasks that require hard-earned skills and consume huge amounts of time. Goodman describes two of these jobs-cheesemaking and brewing-in great detail she’s done both often. In addition to raising children and keeping house, the 16 th-century country wife, among other tasks, ran the household’s dairy operation, brewed the ale that everyone drank in lieu of the often dodgy water supply, and spun the wool that made up the family’s outer garments.

It’s one thing to pay lip service to how much the Western family has changed over the past several centuries and another to witness someone recreating the way it once worked. (or the lack thereof) is one of the minor correctives accomplished by Goodman’s brand of immersive history-a reminder that while we believe we see the past from a detached, enlightened perspective, our view is often blinkered, and so is our notion of what constitutes human needs and nature. Nevertheless, whenever one faction of the reading and film-going public goes swoony over the silk and velvet splendor of Henry VIII’s court or the angelic gowns of the Regency era, naysayers inevitably pop up to jeer about how filthy and stinky everyone was back then. But why this persistent fixation on the hygiene of medieval and early modern Europe? It’s a subject that comes up with far greater frequency than more serious drawbacks like the lack of modern medical science or sewage treatment. Curiosity about the latter is understandable most human beings wonder how people in other cultures do it. How to Be a Tudor opens with the first thing everyone wants to know about the people of that time (how did they smell?) and closes with the second (how did they have sex?). That includes adopting the grooming of the 16 th century. Goodman and her colleagues have worn the clothes, plowed the fields, slept in the beds, cooked the meals, sung the songs, and danced the jigs of whichever era they’ve decided to immerse themselves in.

How To Be a Tudor by Ruth Goodman