I have written to my tutor about the essay, and he has so far replied with a single semicolon.
ABERYSTWYTH, Wales – Dear Dr Penhallow, I am writing from the back room of a friend’s terraced house near the sea front, where the wind has taken the washing line and the Wi-Fi in a single gust. I want to tell you about the essay, about Tudor tea, and about why a person might be sitting on a sofa with a bag of oranges and a tub of cloves when she should be in the library. I will be brief. I will not be brief.
Regarding the essay
The essay on poor relief in the reign of Elizabeth is two-thirds done, in the sense that I have read two-thirds of the books on the list and written the title. I came to Aberystwyth to see my friend Gwenllian, who studies here and keeps a flat above a bakery, and I brought my laptop in the hope that the sea air would encourage scholarship. The sea air has encouraged crisps.
You once told us that the historian’s first duty is to the sources. I have been reading a source this week, and I think you will agree it is relevant.
Regarding Tudor tea
On Wednesday the ianVisits website put out a ticket alert for Tudor tea in the Charterhouse, which is the kind of headline I cannot walk past. The Charterhouse is in London, on the Charterhouse tour page, where you can read its history yourself, and as you taught us it began as a Carthusian monastery before the Dissolution swept through it in Henry VIII’s reign.
I will say only this. As every first-year knows, tea arrived in England long after the Tudors, and I assume the organisers have the matter in hand and that “tea” here is doing the work of “afternoon refreshment in a handsome old building”. I would go like a shot. I would go in a ruff.
The alert does not say what is on the menu, and I have chosen to take that as an invitation. If Elizabeth’s court did not have tea, what did it have? I spent a happy hour finding out that herbal infusions were perfectly common, so Gwenllian and I are holding our own version tonight, with mint and thyme from her windowsill, in two mugs and a pottery jug that I made in September and that leaks only from the handle.
The craft table
Our Tudor evening requires props, which is why the oranges. We are making pomanders, which is to say we are pushing cloves into oranges in neat rows until our thumbs bleed gently. I have also felted a small ruff from a ball of white wool, which Gwenllian wore for four minutes and then described as “a lot like being strangled by a cloud”.
My lino cut this week is a Tudor rose, carved with a spoon because I forgot my gouge, and printed on the back of a pizza menu. It looks like a cabbage in an argument. I have printed eleven copies, and I intend to give you one at the start of term with my sincere apologies for everything.
Regarding back pay
I got to thinking about who would have made the tea in a Tudor household, and the answer is probably a servant on a wage, which brought me to a farm story in which the dairy-versus-beef argument ends when the dairy cow demands back pay. It is the sort of thing that makes you think about the wages of the household staff, and I will be adding a paragraph on it to my footnotes.
It also made me think about the Dissolution, and the number of people who went to bed in the monastery one night and found a new landlord in the morning. I know the feeling. Our own landlord has just put the rent up.
Regarding the quiz
I should explain why I have not been in touch sooner. On Thursday we went to the quiz night at a pub called the Crooked Heron, where Gwenllian runs a team called The Reluctant Scholars, and we came second to a table of retired geologists. The history round had a question about Henry VIII’s wives and I answered it so fast the quizmaster asked if I had a hidden crib sheet. I said no, I had a tutor.
The tiebreak was a question on which Tudor monarch ruled for the shortest time. I said Lady Jane Grey, and I was right, and the geologists said she was not a monarch. We are still in a dispute over this. I would be grateful for a one-line ruling from you in the margin, ideally before Friday.
In conclusion
I have put all this down in my diary for The London Prat, where you can find more of my daily notes at The London Prat if you have a spare quarter of an hour and no marking to do. The paper has a page on London news and a guide to rhyming slang, in case you want to know what apples and pears means in a modern Tudor court.
I will have the essay to you by the weekend. I will have the pomander to you by Monday. If the Charterhouse tea has any spare tickets and the organisers would like a witness who will stay quiet about the tea, I am available.
Yours, in hope of an extension, and with a faint smell of cloves,
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/