It’s quite difficult nowadays to envision a world where our daily lives aren’t populated with modern means of entertainment such as recorded music, the internet and television. But little over a hundred years ago, most of these amenities were unimaginable, which begs the question; what did people two, three, four hundred years ago do to unwind?
Medieval period (5th century – 15th century)
We normally associate the ten centuries or so that make up the Middle Ages with grey, drab, miserable lifestyles with no joy or relief from sickness and brutality. Yet even among the poorer classes, socialising and celebrating were important, if infrequent, parts of Medieval life. There was far greater numbers of festivals and holidays back then, some of the most important including Christmas, Easter and May Day. During these religious celebrations, and other important events such as noble or royal weddings, the lord of the estate, town or region would gift the peasantry with a feast of fine food. The streets would fill with entertainers such as jesters, mummers, minstrels and troubadours, who travelled between towns and cities performing their arts. Mummers would often perform religious plays or reenact classic stories, either in the towns, or in the castles of royalty and nobility. These events would be looked forward to greatly among the lower classes, as for most days of the year, their hours were occupied by labour, or the efforts it took simply to eat, bathe or keep themselves safe. Sunday was the sacred day of rest, and one in which people would gather at the parish church, as a means of both piety and socialisation. Most settlements had a village green, on which people would gather to talk, tell stories or play sports in the evenings. Activities such as hurling, bowls, archery, wrestling and horseshoes were popular. Contrary to common belief, people across all classes, ages and genders enjoyed mentally stimulating board and card games, including shovelboard, hazard, fox and geese and chess, the latter introduced to England in the ninth century. Young boys would also enjoy playing at war games, and later training for the eventuality of battle. Girls’ education was occupied with focuses such as sewing, cooking and cleaning, to prepare them for keeping their own house as adults. Hunting and fishing were also necessary skills to hone, but for the poor, kill was restricted to small animals such as rabbits; it was still considering an atrocity to hunt in crown forests. Of course, more purely pleasurable activities such as drinking, sex and gambling were indulged in across all classes.
Hunting was enjoyed as a social activity more so by the rich, who could afford horses, hounds and were permitted to hunt larger prey such as deer. Often, a nobleman would invite others of his class to his estate to hunt, women included in this number. Other brutal activities such as jousting, cock fighting and hawking were enjoyed by royalty and the court, along with more frequent banquets, populated by entertainers, and followed by dancing. Music of the period was inspired greatly by the Catholic church, as well as the concepts of chivalry and courtly love, and came in the forms of instruments such as the flute, the harp, the cymbals and one’s voice. Musicians and jesters would sometimes be called to the court to entertain a king in bad spirits, a task probably not enviable lest these intentions have the opposite effect. Reading was a skill reserved for the rich and the clergy, but was an academic, not recreational activity for many years.
Tudor and Stuart periods (Late 15th century – early 18th century)
Although the every day life of most common people would have remained much the same in terms of how they spent their leisure time, the general attitudes in England towards the nature of entertainment, particularly under monarchs such as Henry VIII, Elizabeth I and Charles II, altered drastically during this time. Henry VIII was a king famed for lavish expenditure, and these attitudes were mimicked in the all time high of the popularity of gambling. What could be considered the first playing cards had been introduced in the 1400s, and were now swiftly catching on in games such as primero, new cut and noddy; people could lose fortunes in these games, and their immoral practices even had laws passed against them. The holidays of the twelve days of Christmas were celebrated with unprecedented lavishness among the nobility and at the Tudor court, yet all homes across the country marked the occasion with as much splendour as they could spare. The royal court, and many towns, had a Lord of Misrule, whose job it was to arrange festivals, holidays and feasts. Yet the title was abolished late in Henry VIII’s reign, deemed a Catholic practice, but was still in place in many parts of the country.
The art of theatre was to be transformed in Tudor England, first by the gradual shifting of the nature of the plays from those of religious teachings, to those focused on games and songs, and epic tales of lands far away, and secondly, by the invention of the theatre proper. This latter development truly came into fruition during the Elizabethan age, with the creation of the globe theatre and the famed works of playwrights such as Shakespeare and Marlowe. By the mid 1590s, around 15’000 people attended London plays weekly, the wealthier in covered seats, while the poor were bawdy and unruly in the crowded pit below the stage. Of course, many forms of entertainment remained brutal, with games of football of a most violent nature becoming popular, the sports of bear baiting being endorsed by the monarchy and executions being viewed as a great day of entertainment. Not only was it shocking and interesting to witness the public death of important figures, but the crowds around executions brought in great trade and commerce, akin to a morbid festival.
Sword play games continued to flourish, along with the sport of archery, with Henry VIII loving the sport so much that he decreed that every man in England ought to have a longbow in his home. The king’s late brother, Prince Arthur, was known to be so skilled an archer that anyone possessing such talent was dubbed an ‘arthur’. The sport was enjoyed across all classes, but games such as tennis were reserved for the court, with the poor enjoying games more akin to hand ball and balloon ball. Hawking, and the care of the animals by falconers, was a popular pastime, and a prestigious and sophisticated position in a noble household. Yet the Tudor era was famed for a lack of equal intellectual sophistication, with the amount of people taught to read still exceedingly low, and the amount of printed books plummeting. This was to change after the Restoration in 1660, the cultural reforms introduced by Charles II spiking a literacy boom which also extended to the theatres, which included female actors for the first time in English history. Throughout the seventeenth century, the wealth of the country soared due to good trade, and thus the amount of people with money to spend on leisure time increased. These extravagant attitudes must have been a relief for a country in the wake of the restrictions during the Cromwell era of the 1650s, in which places such as inns, theatres and baiting pits were closed under the new reforms.
The 18th century proper
During the eighteenth century, modern concepts of sports, travel and culture truly began to take root. Horse racing took its place as a professional sport, along with cricket, with both the Jockey Club and the official cricket club being formed around 1750. By the latter half of the century, most towns had a theatre, and an assembly room for socialisation and traditional games, which still remained popular as a pastime. Spa towns such as Bath prospered with the renewed interest in the properties of mineral water; along with this came a widely held view that sea air was beneficial for one’s health, and so seaside trips and holidays to towns such as Brighton and Blackpool became increasingly popular, if one could afford it. Another pleasant venue for strolling was the new creation of the pleasure gardens in London in 1746, initially exclusive to the upper echelons, but soon open to most classes due to low entry fees.
Whilst young men frequented their clubs and were encouraged to take a tour of Europe for a year or two, the leisure time of young women was spent acquiring accomplishments and preparing for marriage. In Europe during the eighteenth century, a time consuming part of the day for a woman of royal or noble ranking was the morning toilette, in which the lady would entertain visitors whilst dressing and readying for the day. This would occupy a good few hours of her morning, yet in most cultures, the routine was more private and less extensive. For both genders, literature began to catch on as the first true novels were published, with the daily newspaper being established in 1702. Outwardly, it would seem that the leisure time of society was becoming more refined and dignified. Yet beneath the veneer of high societal fancies, the macabre realities still lurked.
Violent sports such as bear-baiting, cock fighting and boxing were as popular as ever, yet one of the darker shades of entertainment during the eighteenth century was surely the introduction of various curiosity exhibitions into society. This ranged from exotic animals to people with physical deformities, whom society was morbidly curious about, a sick attitude which would continue throughout the Victorian era. Asylums such as Bedlam were viewed as circuses, with crowds of people flooding in to mock and gawk at the inmates. The behaviour of such visitors grew so abominable that the doors of Bedlam were shut to the public in 1770. Yet blood lust could still be satisfied with the ever popular events of executions and criminal punishments, symptomatic of a macabre nature that was allowed by society, and so at odds with the outward decorum and decency of it. The sex trade flourished also with the ever growing populous of cities, with some men travelling to such places exclusively to visit a brothel.
Nineteenth century
By the Regency era, the focus on mentally, intellectually stimulating activities such as reading, painting, needlework and music was well engrained into aristocratic society. An accomplished, desirable young woman would spend her youth acquiring skills such these along with the social etiquette required to make a good match. Most young women were expected to be able to play an instrument such as the pianoforte, the flute or the violin, and to know the popular dances of the era such as the cotillion and the country dance, and later the waltz, introduced in the Regency era proper (1811 – 1820). Dancing, along with walking and riding, was considered good excercise. Intelligent conversation, which could be fed by reading, was considered a mark of good breeding for both sexes, as was art. Parlour and board games, especially chess, also fit the bill for leisure time well spent.
With the industrial boom of the Victorian era, the entertainment sector of society naturally began to spread even wider. Railway travel made access to seaside holiday resorts even easier, especially for those in the middling classes. Circuses continued to draw great crowds, yet in the Victorian era, exhibitions such as the 1851 Great Exhibition, grew more popular, as they educated people about the world and the progression of science and technology. Football and rugby became organised sports, but it wasn’t only men who could now enjoy physical activity. Women had specially shortened skirts to participate in sports such as golf and croquet, and in 1885, when the bicycle first became available, they had a new field of excercise opened up to them. Children were also to benefit from new inventions, as with the new fields of industry also came the toy factory, which enabled children from much poorer classes to have access to luxuries once reserved only for the wealthy. Yet still among the working classes, much time was occupied with earning money, with long hours of hard labour leaving little time for true leisure.
It’s important to remember that the macabre activities enjoyed by some during past centuries, are not reflective of every individual’s tastes, but they are reflective of times which were much less sensitive to violence and brutality. Another vital takeaway, is that we cannot assume that everyone was once permanently bored, in the ages before technology as we know it; life, especially for the lower classes, had a completely different set of exhausting challenges to overcome, which often left no room for leisure. And if one was lucky enough to be able to enjoy such pastimes, one would not know any different from a life void of technology. Perhaps a simpler time, based upon more direct human connection, is an advantage of past societies that we do not possess today. But there are two sides to everything, and it would be impossible to determine which kind of attitudes towards leisure are wholly good or wholly bad.
By, Rowan Speakman
(All images sourced from Wikimedia Commons).
Rowan Speakman Books 