In a sixteenth-century survey of Edward Seymour’s estates, there is a valuable account of his Wiltshire home, Wolf Hall, or, as the Tudors would have known it, Wulfhall. It describes the manor house itself, nestled in 1,263 acres of land made up of gardens, meadows and orchards. The gardens had names, such as the Great Palyd Garden, My Young Lady’s Garden and Mine Old Lady’s Garden. Some of this land was used for pasture and farming, bringing in a revenue of £12 each year, equivalent today to around £5,000. Looking out at the estate in the 1530s, you would have seen parks sustaining horses, red deer and sheep, all surrounded by woodland. Edward Seymour took his own steps to improve and modernise his family home, which had been the Seymours’ seat since the medieval period, by adding a hare warren and a pond, the pond costing him a considerable £43 (around £18,000 today).
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| Portrait of Henry VIII in 1540, the year after his visit to Wulfhall. Wellcome Collection, United Kingdom - CC BY 4.0. |
The house, which no longer survives today, also sustained a large household dedicated to making the Seymour family comfortable and taking care of their more mundane domestic business. A list of payments to servants at Wolf Hall in 1537, the year Edward’s sister Queen Jane gave birth to Prince Edward, survives and was published in the late nineteenth century. Of the 44 male servants at the house, a man named Sir James was a priest in the family’s private chapel, while a man named Vince was Keeper of the Home Park. The family also had gardeners and labourers ('William the Grubber and John Wynbolt the under-grubber’), and John, a carter who worked with a servant called Wynter. Christopher was the Keeper of the Great Horses, while a man named Gorway worked as the estate’s shepherd.
There were women, too. Edy is mentioned as working in the ‘day house’, with Jone Cocks her ‘fellow’, or her servant. Awdry was the family’s laundress, earning £1 per year, the same as the carter, with other women Winifred Holt, Margery Garret, Margery Gilman and Elizabeth Burde’s roles not individually specified. Ann Coles was nurse to Edward and Anne Seymour’s son, Lord Beauchamp, and earned £2, 13s and 4 pence annually. ‘Mr Edward Seymour’s nurse’ is not given a name of her own, but followed close behind, earning £2 per year, the same amount as the priest.
Two years later Awdry and her colleagues would have been working amid a bustle of activity at Wolf Hall as the Seymours prepared to welcome a special guest: Edward's brother in law King Henry VIII. Henry had been married to Edward’s sister Jane in 1536, but she had died after childbirth in October the following year. He would later embark on a politically-driven marriage with Anne of Cleves which lasted just a few months in 1540. At the time of his visit in 1539 to the Seymours though, Henry was, briefly, single.
The burly king disembarked from his horse on the warm Saturday of 9 August, meeting Edward and his wife Anne at the doors of their home. A record of the supplies purchased for the visit shows that Henry arrived with his ‘nobility and whole household’, while Anne and Edward’s entire household were also present. Cooks set to work creating breads, pastries and other foods, which the 200-strong party washed down with 2 tuns and 3 hogsheads of beer and ale, and cups of both Gascon and sweet varieties of wine. The warm scent of cloves, ginger, cinnamon and nutmeg wafted from the kitchens, as cooks prepared jellies, confectionery and spiced wine, Hippocras.
Pots and ovens sizzled with fish and seafood as pikes, tenches, lobsters, bream and plaice were prepared. Salmon, trout, eel and sturgeon were also served, with sauces made from mustard, verjuice and vinegar. Two mealtimes were served, ‘dinner’, at 10am and ‘supper’ at around 5pm. A cook and a ‘turnebroche’ (turnspit) were hired specially for the event and were paid 7 shillings and 8 pence for their ‘labor in the kychin’. The diners did not eat in silence, and flutes, trumpets and viols (an early violin), were played to entertain as hungry nobles, members of the royal family and officials enjoyed their meals in the Wiltshire countryside.
Awdry. the laundrywoman, would have been working hard to ensure Edward’s shirts were freshly washed in time for the visit, while other servants strewed fresh rushes on the floor of the house, also mentioned in the account books. The Seymours spent £3 on coals, wood and rushes to ensure the king and his party were comfortable, despite England being at its peak summer season. Edward also decided to spruce up the roof of his barn with a coat of paint, with Philip Cornish, John Befell, Miles Range, John Miles and John Cox paid ‘for their pains taken in painting the rood of my boards barn, with frets upon canvas, against the king’s coming to Wulf-hall, 9 August’. It is likely that this is the barn where the wedding celebrations between Henry and Edward’s sister Jane had been carried out in 1536, a long, thatched building then on the family’s estate. Henry, visiting just two years after his loss of Jane, would not have wanted to see the barn in a state of disrepair or negligence. It was also needed during as a makeshift residence. The Seymours vacated the main house for the king and his nobles, while Edward slept in the barn. The account book states that painters, joiners, carpenters and masons were employed ‘of the barn at Wulf Hall wherein my lord lay and kept his house during the king’s abode there’. Anne and the couple’s children stayed at the nearby Penham Lodge.
The next day, Sunday 10 August, the feasting was more extravagant and not limited to fish, with six oxen and 24 muttons roasted in the Seymour’s kitchens, along with chickens, quails, swans, cranes, pheasants, storks and partridges. More people were present, (around 400), suggesting that members of the local nobility and gentry - and their servants - came to pay their respects to the king. On this day, the cooks also prepared a side dish of samphire, a salty flavoured green plant that grows near the sea, which would have accompanied the various meats and birds. The indulgence continued on the Tuesday, but slightly more modestly, with olives, prunes and ‘great raisins’, accompanying sparrows and a goat. The Seymours must have sighed with relief when the king’s last day arrived, Tuesday 12 August, when they again fed a slightly reduced number of people (230 messes were allocated at the king’s table and 100 at Edward’s). The records show that Henry stayed only for dinner, so we can be sure and his substantial retinue had left before 5pm in the afternoon when supper was normally served. The week of the king’s visit cost the Seymours just over £288, with additional costs including musicians, extra staff and last-minute repairs. Some of the costs were offset by the king’s officers. Although currency calculations are not straight forward, the National Archives Currency Calculator calculated that this sum would have had a modern purchasing power of around £121,000. For a week.
Surviving accounts books are fascinating, because not only do they show the economical value of produce in the sixteenth century but they give an intimate view of a household, its servants and its organisation. In this case, we can gain a greater understanding of how ambitious nobles entertained their monarch.
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Source: Rev J.E. Jackson, FSA. Wulfhall and The Seymours, 1874.
