Tudor Children

by Nicholas Orme

The first history of childhood in Tudor England
 
What was it like to grow up in England under the Tudors? How were children cared for, what did they play with, and what dangers did they face?
 
In this beautifully illustrated and characteristically lively account, leading historian Nicholas Orme provides a rich survey of childhood in the period. Beginning with birth and infancy, he explores all aspects of children’s experiences, including the games they played, such as Blind Man’s Bluff and Mumble-the-Peg, and the songs they sang, such as “Three Blind Mice” and “Jack Boy, Ho Boy.” He shows how social status determined everything from the food children ate and the clothes they wore to the education they received and the work they undertook.
 
Although childhood and adolescence could be challenging and even hazardous, it was also, as Nicholas Orme shows, a treasured time of learning and development. By looking at the lives of Tudor children we can gain a richer understanding of the era as a whole.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Tudor Period, British Literature

288 pages, Hardcover

Published April 11, 2023

About the author

A specialist in the Middle Ages and Tudor period, Nicholas Orme is an Emeritus Professor of History at Exeter University. He studied at Magdalen College, Oxford, and has worked as a visiting scholar at, among others, Merton College, Oxford, St John's College, Oxford, and the University of Arizona.

Reviews

[Chad D]

Pretty much an ideal book. Does what it says on the tin, with loads and loads of fascinating facts, illustrations, and examples that bring Tudor childhood to life in the reader's imagination.

[Namera [The Literary Invertebrate]]

RTC

[Emily]

*4.5 Stars*

A great mixture of academic and popular history. Easily readable and engaging

[Emily Richards]

I’d seen this in my local book store for months and picked it up every time but couldn’t justify paying for a hardback. Received it as a gift for xmas and it didn’t disappoint!! All the info on Tudor-specific childhood experience was super interesting but I most enjoyed identifying the similarities between Tudor children and children today, i.e. disliking teachers, playing stupid games. Only thing I struggled with was sometimes Orne made reference to too many people/things in one sentence when making a point which became slightly convoluted and confusing. Otherwise, super accessible and interesting! Loved!

[Kelly]

A clearly written, intriguing book.
I liked the first bits best but expected to like the religious chapter and play. I hated school but I bet Tudor boys hated it more. Loved the details about teachers.
I have another book by Ormes and am looking forward to it.

[Heidi Malagisi]

When we study history, we tend to focus on the lives of the famous figures, primarily starting at adolescence until their deaths. We tend to forget that before a person became an adolescent, they had to go from birth to the height of puberty. This area of life tends to be left behind because the farther back you go, the less documentation there is about this stage of life. We have a bit more documentation during the 16th century, which was the time of the Tudors in England, so what can we learn about childhood during this period of the past? Nicholas Orme explores childhood in 16th-century England in his latest book, “Tudor Children.”

I am always looking for a new aspect of the past, so the idea of a book dedicated to the topic of childhood was intriguing to me. Obviously, with the time travel/guides to the past, this topic is touched upon, but to have an entire nonfiction book is rare, so I knew I wanted to read it and see what new insights Orme could bring to the past.

To examine a topic like childhood, Orme breaks his book into seven chapters, plus the reflections. The chapters focus on birth and infancy, childhood at home, play, religion, school, speech, songs and stories, and growing up. Orme provides a great amount of detail about a child’s life from the moment they are born to the time when they could get a job. While we think that we can only understand the past from documents about the nobility and royalty, Orme proves his readers wrong by including information about children from all walks of life and how the constantly changing religious environment affected raising children. He also includes a plethora of images depicting stages of childhood to give his readers a bit more depth to this book, which was quite lovely.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and learning a lot about Tudor childhood. It gave me a better appreciation for the past, 16th-century England, and raising children. It was well researched and easy to follow, which is impressive for an academic book. While the ways of the past may seem foreign to us, there is also a familiarity in teaching children the ways of the world. If you are interested in learning about what it was like to be a child or raise a child in
16th-century England, I highly recommend you read “Tudor Children” by Nicholas Orme.

[Edith]

Tudor Children is full of information, and a wonderful resource, written in a way that sounds as if the author were sitting in the same room with you, just chatting about how children lived five hundred years ago. He discusses birth, health, education, songs and stories they would have known, religion, marriage, parenting. Very beautifully illustrated, with copious notes. Highly recommended.

[Christopher]

Fascinating little book. History is often assumed to be about adults. But life is always accompanied by children.

The idea of "childhood" did not begin with Carroll's Alice in Wonderland or Rousseau. It's likely always been with us. The 16th century is lite on sources, but there is still enough to fill a 200 page book systematically exploring topics from birth, toys, school, religion, work, and more from the varying perspectives of the poor and rich.

The printing of this volume is particularly exceptional. The paintings and illustrations look great!

[Ki]

In spite of the very interesting topic, the book manages to be quite dry and uninspired. But I'm sure it's a treasure-trove for anyone researching the time or topic, it's just not well suited for general leisure reading. Example upon example upon even more examples, and a few more examples and quotes. But the pictures, some in color, were great. I'm sorry, I just found it tedious to read.

[Liz]

An impressive book, a great read: not too academic, intellectual but so, so interesting.
The book is divided into chapters such as play, school etc. and the wealth of detail in each is impressive, including the games played, the songs sung etc.
To quote from The Times:
‘Orme has long been an opponent of a view that became current 40 years ago, that men and women in the late medieval period did not invest emotionally in their children. Rather, so the theory went, they bred them as future contributors to the family coffers and stayed dry-eyed when they died. In this book Orme doubles down on his belief that parenting Tudor-style involved the same emotional commitment that is familiar to us today. While it might have been difficult to give your kids shoes, and although you might occasionally have to fall back on feeding them cats and nettles, that didn’t mean you didn’t love them deeply and mourn them long and hard when they were gone.’ Lawrence Stone, in his book ‘The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800’ written in 1977 also says that children were loved, providing examples of, for instance, letters written on the death of a child.

Personally, I loved the way the illustrations were included as part of the writing as opposed to being altogether in a separate section. This saved me continually having to flick through it.

A minor flaw: His continual flagging of what’s to come E.g. P54 ‘And as we shall see …’ P59/60 ‘In the following chapters we shall explore four of these …’ and on many pages ‘as we shall see’. That said, I highly recommend this book for lovers of historical facts.

[Helen]

The author claims this is just a first book on the subject, that he expects others to expand on the sections but the expansions are most likely to be lately discovered examples to further illustrate points made by Prof. Orme.
This book covers all the main parts of children's lives, infancy, school (across the classes), religion, work and apprenticeship, games and amusements, crime and punishment. It is easy to read and understand, profusely illustrated with apt period drawings and paintings, and all in all a complete pleasure.

[Philip Talmage]

Professor Orme writes (again) so well. Illustrations are included, not as mere decoration, but referenced in the text to elaborate relevant points.
Granted, the material on which he bases his analysis is very thin, nevertheless it's clear that childhood then (for the more affluent) was not so very different to childhood nowadays - or, at least, to the childhood that he (and I) experienced in the 1940s.

[Christine]

Interesting book . The author has limited resources but has clearly worked hard to find out about the topic with a lot of care and persistence. There are gaps as some levels of society weren’t really recorded. It is a somewhat formal read but does make human the children of Tudor times and gives a sense of what their lives may have been like.

[Marcella]

"[This] also comes from an assumption - as old as academic history - that the history of any particular topic is a history of adults."

Really fascinating insight into the lives of Tudor era children. Like the quote above (taken from the Reflections section) states, we don't normally consider the lives of children when we think about history and historic events, and that's a real shame!

[Olivia]

Beautifully written, extremely accessible, and frequently adorable. I especially loved that it was peppered with contemporary images of children playing, throwing snowballs, working, acting, going to school etc.

[Lisa]

Friendly to a non academic audience but also super helpful to me in my scholarship. Appreciated the organization looking at children from birth to becoming adults and the attention to their legal status as well as religious lives, and the differentiation between Catholics and Protestants

[Riley]

more of a focus on boys than on girls which is understandable given the source material

[Steph]

I love ALL THINGS EARLY MODERN. I also liked his voice. And the way that it started with Elizabeth of York way to draw me in well done.

[Toby]

Nicholas Orme is the master of historical excavation when it comes to the domestic and social lives of mediaeval and early-modern Britons. His Going to Church in Mediaeval England provided remarkable detail about that ubiquitous side of English life half a millennium and more ago. His most recent book Tudor Children deals with an equally prevalent slice of human life but one that has considerably less detail for him to make use of. As a result this book is considerably shorter.

His conclusion that "it is impossible to state concisely what Tudor childhood was like, as opposed to collecting and gathering its scattered aspects" is therefore unsurprising. We have almost no written records of what it was like to be child in the sixteenth century (one or two fragments arising out of school exercises, and a plea from a student that his tutor stop beating him) which means that almost everything is filtered through an adult lens. Shakespeare and other playwrights are used as source material.

The paucity of evidence notwithstanding Orme does a good job in collecting and gathering such scraps as he can find. The book is divided into thematic chapters: Birth and infancy; childhood at home; play; religion; school; speech; songs and stories; growing up. This covers all that you could hope for. He rightly cautions that there was no one experience of childhood (as is the case today), but some constants recur. Childhood was comparatively short and adolescence was longer. We don't know quite what the experience of children was but we can make educated guess from what children do today. Imitating adults in play and speech is one obvious way. It is a shame that we don't know more about the stories and nursery rhymes that delighted children in. We know much more a hundred years hence and perhaps it is not stretching supposition too far to assume that much had not changed. It was clearly a more brutal world. The children were brutalised by teachers and sometimes parents and in turn took delight in brutalising creatures. The Robin Hood stories were popular but puritans and others worried that tales of violence encouraged the young to go and do likewise. A familiar worry in the Twenty First Century.

If Tudor Children didn't leave me much clearer as to what the experience of being under 16 was like in the sixteenth century, there is a wealth of stories and glimpses of people and situations that bring the occasional flashes of insight to a murky and distant world.