Tudor Lifestyle Facts

Haunted Tudor House


Everyday people of the Tudor age were not typicaly dressed in lavish embroidered brocade and ruffs, as we see in famous portrtaits and paintings of the time. Indeed, very few but the super-rich could afford to dress like that. A dress of that style could cost anything from £35 onwards, which was very expensive, considering that a gentleman's income was £50 per annum.
The rich tudors were very extravagant with their spending and an ideal example of this is when Henry VIII spent over £1,000 on a set of tapestries for his walls. This amount of money in those days was outlandishly enormous and more than most people would earn in an entire lifetime (the average labourer's annual wage amounting to around just £2).

In much the same way, Tudor homes were not what their counterparts are today. Tudor-styled housing today is filled with varnished wooden panelling and of course all mod cons including more than one lavatory many times. The original Tudor homes had rough, unvarnished wooden panelling, which was painted in bright colours. There were dirt fllors, which would have been next to impossible to keep clean, while the walls were filled with daub and dung, which would have attracted more than your average creepy-crawley.
To add insult to injury, many houses, even of the rich, did not have a lavatory facility and ocuupants had to walk to the end of their street and use the public facility, in order to relieve themselves. As for sleeping arrangements, it was not unusual for people to be sharing their bed with more than one person, all for the purposes of convenience and not for pleasure...Beds it seems, were a highly sought after item of furniture.