Search results for ""Author Ben Norman""

Standing directly below the royal family in the social hierarchy of Stuart England, the aristocracy naturally dominated national and local life between 1603 and 1714. Nowadays, members of this prestigious group are best recalled through their hereditary titles, oil portraits, political allegiances, surviving church monuments, and the complicated relationships they cultivated with the ruling sovereign of the day. There is, however, something forever remote about the endless titles, antique paintings, and 350-year-old cathedral effigies. To truly be acquainted with the Stuart aristocracy, it is necessary to ask questions about their personal, day-to-day experiences: What did they wear to bed? How did they treat their servants? What did they do for fun? In whom did they confide their innermost secrets? In this book, all these questions and many more will be answered. Get to know the Stuart aristocracy on an intimate level by discovering what they ate and drank, how their houses were furnished, what possessions were most important to them, the pastimes they enjoyed, the people they loved, the friends they hated, the outlandish customs they tolerated, and, most fundamentally of all, the everyday lives they led. Although undeniably privileged and distinguished, sometimes eccentrically so, there is an argument to be made that the titled men and women of early modern England are not quite as unfamiliar to modern eyes as they first appear.

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Death was a constant presence in the lives of the rich and poor alike in seventeenth-century England, being much more visible in everyday existence than it is today. It is a highly important and surprisingly captivating part of the epic story of England during the turbulent years of the 1600s. This book guides readers through the subject using a chronological approach, as would have been experienced by those living in the country at the time, beginning with the myriad causes of death, including disease, war, and capital punishment, and finishing with an exploration of posthumous commemoration. Although contemporaries of the seventeenth century did not fully realise it, when it came to the confrontation of mortality they were living in wildly changing times.

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This is the story of a crucial year in the history of England, brimming with great political and social upheaval: the year 1603. 1603 was a time of last goodbyes and new beginnings; of waning customs and fresh political and constitutional visions. It saw an aged queen die and a king from the far north rise as sovereign over a foreign nation. It also witnessed an unprecedented outbreak of bubonic plague, which began in London and spread indiscriminately through the provinces, killing up to 30,000 people. Catholicism was a second major disease doing the rounds in 1603. Its presence would lead to an attempt to dethrone King James I in the very first months of his reign, culminating in a trial staged at Winchester Castle in November. One of the candidates the conspirators had in mind to replace him was the would-be queen Lady Arbella Stuart. Indeed, Arbella would bring her own dramas to an already crowded and politically and socially charged year. The present work considers the entirety of the year 1603 in England, from January to December. In this same spirit, it also pays attention to the lives of ordinary men and women, as well as the lives of the great and powerful of the land. How aware were so-called common folk of the significant national episodes playing out around them? Did they even care? The answers are both fascinating and unexpected, and raise important questions about the interrelationship between the ordinary and the extraordinary in seventeenth-century England.

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