500 years ago, England was emerging into a new era.
After years of war, plague and famine,
the kingdom was enjoying peace and prosperity
under the reign of the first Tudor king, Henry VII.
A new class of business-savvy farmer was thriving,
boosting food production...
And then over she goes.
..while wool from their sheep was generating half the nation's wealth.
Many of the nation's farms were under the control
of the biggest landowner in England after the King,
the monasteries.
Their influence could be felt in every aspect of daily life.
They were not just places of religion,
they were at the forefront of technology,
education and farming.
But with the daily lives of monks devoted to prayer,
they depended increasingly on tenant farmers
who worked and tended their lands.
Steady, girl.
Now, historian Ruth Goodman
and archaeologists Tom Pinfold and Peter Ginn
are turning the clock back to Tudor England,
here at Weald and Downland in West Sussex,
to work as ordinary farmers
under the watchful eye of a monastic landlord.
Here, away.
That's the way, nice.
To succeed, they'll have to master long lost farming methods...
They're going again.
..and get to grips with Tudor technology...
SHRIEKING
Quite noisy. Wow, it's a really violent process!
..while immersing themselves in the beliefs...
ALL: Amen.
..customs...
and rituals that shaped the age.
This is merry England for heaven's sake, so to speak,
let's enjoy it.
This is the untold story
of the monastic farms of Tudor England.
It's September, the beginning of autumn,
and the days are getting shorter.
The team are preparing for the end of their farming year
and their time as Tudor farmers.
Ruth, Peter and Tom need to make provisions for the winter.
The pea crop has been collected and stored.
Yeah, this is good.
Flabbergasted with just how many peas we've got.
Yeah.
It's time to bring the animals back to the farm
from their summer grazing.
And the barley crop is now ready to be harvested.
In the Tudor period, the harvest was the climax of the farming year.
If the harvest failed or the weather turned,
it could lead to malnutrition and even famine.
It's a lot of barley, isn't it?
It's a lot of work, but it looks amazing. Yeah.
Like, the colour is just incredible.
As one of England's largest landowners,
monasteries owned vast amounts of agricultural land.
Most fields were open and not enclosed by hedges,
unlike today.
So, tenant farmers would be given strips of land to cultivate
within these large areas.
So, I suppose as much as this could be a huge open field,
we would just have this strip here, wouldn't we?
And also probably another strip over there
and another strip over there.
But everyone would be growing the same crop
and it'd be all hands to the pump. Yeah, definitely.
Well, that's why school holidays take the form they do, isn't it?
Cos even students had to come out and do harvesting.
Yeah. We need bodies!
The team are discovering
just how backbreaking the harvest would have been
for the Tudor farmer.
It's amazing how often we have to actually sharpen our tools.
I mean, you think metal versus barley, it'd be an easy win,
but it's not.
Once it's cut, it needs to be bound into sheaves.
Traditionally,
it's the men who reap and the women who bind.
So, you run along behind the blokes, picking up all the loose stalks...
..and then binding it into a sheaf.
See, so much easier to control once it's bound like that.
Every last grain from the harvest was precious.
Even the smallest amounts would be gathered by those less well off,
a practice known as gleaning.
Well, for very poor people it was a really important source of food.
I mean, for anybody that extra bit makes the difference, doesn't it?
You know, if you think this is your year's crop,
that little bit that's gleaned by the kids is the last week's food.
Yeah. And you can get pretty hungry in that last week.
And don't we know it. THEY LAUGH
If it rained, then all the barley they had gathered would be ruined.
To prevent this, the sheaves were stood upright on the ground,
known as stooking,
which allowed the grain to dry off.
It is the most incredible amount of work.
This tiny little piece that we've done of our strip,
this has taken us four and a half hours to do.
And look at how much more there is waiting for us.
As well as bringing in the crops,
it was crucial, in the autumn, to prepare meat for the winter.
The essential ingredient for doing this was salt.
Ruth's learning the job of a waller,
the women who were in charge of making salt.
Salt was one of the most important commodities
of the ancient world, and also in the medieval.
It was one of those things that you simply couldn't do without.
It was necessary for survival,
it was an important item of trade
and a huge industry.
However, it was one of the basic staples of life
which you basically had to purchase for cash.
It was part of the cash economy,
unlike, say, carrots which you could grow your own.
In Tudor times, the majority of salt was imported from France or Spain.
But pockets of England were highly productive.
Especially areas in the north that had natural brine springs.
The team have reconstructed the equipment used in this period.
What I've got here are two different parts,
a furnace and a pan.
Now, the pan is made of lead, flat-bottomed
to evaporate off as much of the water to produce the salt.
But that has sort of technical difficulties.
Lead is a very soft metal.
It means that under the weight of the water
there's a danger that it would collapse downwards.
So, that's what this frame over the top is for.
It's actually for supporting the pan.
The areas set up for salt production were known as walling yards.
Hence the name "waller" for the women who worked there.
The pans were left boiling 24 hours a day.
It takes some serious boiling to turn brine back into salt
but it is beginning to happen.
The surface is crusting over,
it's becoming so concentrated.
Bucket after bucket after bucket of brine.
Reduce, reduce, reduce.
And there it is,
salt forming as a skin on the surface.
In autumn, the Tudor farmer would make provisions
to ensure all their valuable animals would survive winter.
We're coming up here cos the weather's turned, it's got cold.
We need to look after our flock, we need to protect our investment.
And the best way to do that is to get them back
to our homestead, to get them back to the farm.
You can even sleep above your animals
to get the heat coming up, if you so need to.
TOM LAUGHS You're not enjoying the cottage then?
The farmstead not good enough for you? You won't snuggle!
The monastery's flocks could number thousands.
Tenant farmers faced the daunting task
of herding their sheep from the fields back to their farms.
So, we've got sheep up there and sheep up there.
Ideally, get them down the middle, work them down. Yeah?
Pincer movement? Pincer movement.
I'll see you in about an hour!
Don't fall asleep,
counting your sheep.
The 1530s would see a turning point in sheep-farming.
At the end of the monastic era,
the monastery's land was sold
so flocks were broken up
and large common fields were enclosed.
Here, sheep. Come on.
This is good, they're going.
It was the last time these huge flocks grazed together,
changing farming enterprises
and the landscape of Britain.
Come on. Hey.
It's going really well.
This field is massive, it's an open field.
But the secret is not to go in there too hard and heavy.
We're just slowly pushing them,
tickling them here, tweaking them there
and they're all bunching together in a mammoth flock.
Good stuff, Tom.
We don't even have a dog this time.
I've got you, Peter, I've got you.
The brine has been boiling for four hours.
Enough water has evaporated for Ruth to attempt
the next stage of the process -
extracting the salt.
The very best quality salt is this first...
scum.
If it's clean.
And there is one thing I could do
to make sure that it really is clean.
What I need to do is throw a load of proteins in
and then those proteins will bind with any impurities that are there.
The cheapest was ox blood
but I haven't got a huge supply of that.
I'm going to try with some eggs.
And just give 'em a big stir up.
It's certainly gathering bits together in larger clumps.
I mean, the sort of leaves and twigs it's not doing much to.
But it does look like
it's taken some of that funny colour out.
Prices for salt varied depending on its purity and whiteness.
There were different grades of salt
with the greyest and cheapest used for household cleaning,
and the whitest being reserved for salting cheese.
That is looking much cleaner.
Ruth is experimenting with forming salt
in a traditional wicker cone.
These would have been used for draining and transporting.
It will be taken back to the farmhouse
to be used for her winter preparations.
Before the weather turns,
the barley needs to be safely stored
or the crop will be ruined.
To ensure it is kept safe,
the boys are using an age-old technique -
picking gorse.
So, what we're going to do
is actually make a layer of this gorse on the bottom of our barn.
And these spikes will keep the mice and the rats at bay,
keep them out of it.
But also raising the barley off the floor
will just get some air underneath, keep it nice and dry,
protect our investment, protect our crop.
Although, this is not a job I'm enjoying.
It seems like it was going to be one of our easiest tasks
but...at the moment...
Bleeding, now.
Prickling my ankles.
I know. It's like taking an angry dog for a walk, isn't it?
Autumn was the time for slaughtering animals,
as it was harder to feed and look after them
in the colder months.
The tenant farmer would want to make their meat last
for the months ahead.
Ruth is trying a Tudor technique for preserving beef,
using the salt she's produced.
You know, nowadays we cut up beasts
according to certain joints we want to get out.
But a Tudor butcher was looking for something rather different.
He was looking to be able to fill his barrel
with equal sized pieces
of a portion for a man.
Nobody really worried too much when they were butchering
whether one person got mostly meat and another person got mostly fat,
as long as you got your 2lb weight.
It's not exactly easy though,
butchering it up into beautiful pieces.
Salting the meat for winter
was usually the job of the Tudor housewife.
I am really pleased with my salt cone.
But I can tell you, it's a heck of a lot of work.
After the salt has been crumbled,
it is then rubbed onto every surface of the meat.
And what I'm hoping to do by this process
is to dehydrate the meat.
I'm going to try and draw out all the juices within it
because they are what allow infection in.
Once the blood and other fluids have been drawn out of the beef,
it is ready to be stored in brine -
a mixture of water that has been boiled with salt and herbs.
This will move the salt further into the tissues of the meat.
There we go.
Now, just need to leave it in the brine for three days
for that brine to really penetrate.
Once this has happened,
the meat can be packed into a new barrel of dry salt
for the final stage in preserving.
During the winter,
pieces of the meat would then be taken out and rinsed
when required for cooking.
So I'll jump over, Peter. You pass it over?
Yep, let's get this gorse down.
Oh, it's prickly, prickly stuff.
If I pop it over there and you can spread it with that.
I suppose, not only have we brought our sheep and our cows in,
we're also bringing in our harvest.
And by doing so, we're leaving stubble fields
so we're taking away the home of the rats and the mice
and we're creating a food store for them.
So they're all going to come here looking for food,
so we need this gorse down here to protect it,
otherwise we're in shtook.
This barley would have been used throughout the year
to make two of our staples, bread and ale, so it's very important.
Well, one more load to get
and then, we can have our feast.
I'm looking forward to it. Let's crack on.
It's Michaelmas, a feast day to St Michael,
the protector of the Christian Church.
It marks the shortening of days
and the end of the yearly farming cycle.
Ruth is cooking goose,
the traditional meat eaten at this time of year.
I mean, nowadays many people only ever eat goose,
if they eat it at all, at Christmas.
And that's a madness from a farming point of view.
Utterly ridiculous!
It's completely out of season.
There are two points in the year when it makes sense to eat goose.
One is towards the end of summer.
At that moment, they are at their fattest and their juiciest
and it used to be called a green goose, a grass-fed goose.
However, if you want to keep them through to Michaelmas,
then there is one more source of free food
to fatten up your goose.
You set your geese free on your stubble lands
and they pick about.
And any of the dropped grains they feed on
and fatten up a second time.
And that is a stubble goose,
just ready for Michaelmas.
The last of the barley is being brought in to be stored.
It was customary, once the last field was reaped,
for people to celebrate,
marking joy and relief
after the hard work that had gone into the farming year.
The celebration took the form of "Harvest Home"
and was steeped in rituals,
as communities across the kingdom
thanked God for helping them with their harvest.
It's almost religious. It's like every single grain is precious,
the amount of work and effort that has gone into this.
There you go. Thank you.
Thank you.
Professor Ronald Hutton has joined the team
to help bring in the harvest.
So this year, the fact that we've got such a good crop,
this really is a moment for celebration.
Let's consider the alternative a moment.
There was a disease in Tudor England called the bloody flux.
In modern times, we thought it was some infection that had died out.
Only with our relief work in Ethiopia and the Sudan
in the late 20th century
did we realise that the bloody flux is the last stage of starvation.
Oh! When your body is famished beyond a certain point,
the wall of your intestine gives way
in a massive haemorrhage that kills you off.
Oh, goodness! And that's the alternative
to getting in a good harvest... or even a harvest.
That's pretty stark.
With the dark prospect of famine avoided,
the farmers would have been able to rejoice.
Once the cart was filled with the last of the barley,
the community would choose a Harvest Queen,
a maiden from the local village
who would be carried on top of the cart
as it made its way back to the farm.
What do you think? Na-na-na...
Mary? ALL: Yeah.
We think so? Okey-doke. Come on then. Come on, come on, here she is.
Here she is.
Congratulations, Mary. That sounded pretty unanimous.
You get the honour of a crown and a ride in the cart.
Lucky you! You're going to grace our last harvest.
Gentlemen. Yes.
One last little ordeal for you. Yes(!)
There are generally games involved in bringing home,
triumphantly, the last cart from the field.
Games like?
Usually, guys versus girls, one which lasted for centuries
after the Tudor era was for the men - that's you, I'm afraid -
to try and get a small sheaf of cereal each into the barn.
Now, you see the ladies are lined up behind you armed with water,
who will try and empty the water over as you do so,
so this is speed and intelligence. LAUGHTER
Ready.
One, two, three...
LAUGHTER
Oh, you and your crazy ideas!
This is history that does it to us. LAUGHTER
I'm just the messenger. And you're dry!
The rituals were followed by a great feast
to reward the harvest workers for their toil.
Hooray, harvest over!
It was a time of year which marked relief,
expressed by giving thanks for farming success.
Who's carving the goose?
It's Michaelmas, the Feast Of St Michael And All Angels,
which marks the real end of the agricultural year.
That's why we're celebrating so hard.
And the monastery has rewarded us,
for our labour, by a customary extra gift of a goose...
..which we roast for Michaelmas, to show that not only are we getting
on well with each other, but we're getting on well with our landlord.
But before we do anything, would you please speak the grace?
Benedictus, Benedicat per Jesum
Christum Dominum Nostrum, amen.
Bravo. Amen.
Well, I have to say this goosey is fair. Carve away.
Oh, goosey, goosey!
Pass down your plate!
Pass down your plates if you'd like a wing.
There, more geese.
LAUGHTER AND CHATTING
Well, Ronald, it is good to be alive.
It certainly is right now. Remember, in 1500, we have winter
ahead of us - hyperthermia, darkness, and above all, boredom.
We're going to have to while away those long nights
with lots of stories.
Well, as the beer is flowing we'll have a few stories.
That's a wonderful, wonderful idea, here's to you.
CHEERING
With the harvest safely stored, the team have
completed their farming obligations for the monastery.
For the previous 800 years, monasteries had
been at the forefront of farming, education and technology,
as well as a hub for a range of craft and commercial activities.
Monasteries wanted elaborate, beautiful buildings to
display their devotion to God, and skilled masons were in high demand.
Peter has come to Gloucester Cathedral to meet with
master mason, Pascal Mychalysin, who is restoring the stonework.
What are you working on at the moment? A canopy.
And is this for Gloucester Cathedral?
Yeah. A canopy that's stone, which is covering a statue,
the head of a statue.
It always amazes me, cathedrals, they're so beautiful and
so ornately carved and, I suppose, one of the few
buildings that were built out of stone in the period.
So, yeah, when we talk about stone architecture we talk, in medieval
times, we talk almost exclusively about religious architecture. Yeah.
That means the masons, their patrons were the Church
and very soon most masons would, would be out of a job...
Yeah, OK. ..after the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Yeah.
A mason would trace designs onto floors and use basic geometry
and rules of proportion to create buildings that have
lasted for centuries.
What is extraordinary with the medieval mason,
and Tudor masons is what they did with almost nothing
and using very, very little tools and mostly they used their wits.
Right. And that's the tool they cut it all with. Right.
A pickaxe. And that's it? That's all they had.
So could anyone become a mason?
The modern equivalent to understand that spot-on is you go to
a football academy. Either you can kick the ball or you can't.
Right. It's a ruthless, but fair system of meritocracy. Yeah.
At the end of the day, you know you can have the skills
of wielding the axe, or you can't.
I've kicked a few balls in my time and they've never gone in the direction I want them to,
but hopefully, if I hit a few blocks of stone I can er...
Yeah, well we, we can have a little demonstration.
Building was usually done in the spring and summer months.
The mason would work with stone that was fresh from the quarry
and contained natural sap that made it soft and much easier to carve.
The stone could be put in place and left to set in the winter.
All right, that cut looks absolutely fantastic,
and you're doing that all by eye?
Well, I'm a trained mason
so it would be sad if I couldn't do it.
You make it look so easy. Have a go.
OK. And this finger, this is basically for guidance, is it?
This piece of stone will be placed in the Cathedral when complete.
You see you've got to control the cutting angles,
so you've got to go in a bit...
Yeah, I can see straightaway
it's coming out like that, so I need to...
So, what, tilt the axe slightly up like that? Yeah.
Yeah, not bad. It's amazing the difference
that the index finger makes, it does give you...
Control. ..that control.
A Tudor stonemason would traditionally
serve a seven-year apprenticeship.
A system which still operates today.
And what is nice too is the medieval mason didn't need to go to the gym.
HE LAUGHS Definitely not! Keep you fit.
Well, based on that very, very little bit of me... Yeah.
..chopping a bit of stone off, do you think I've got potential
to be able to kick a football in your stonemason academy?
Yeah, I think we can put you on a three-month trial. Right.
I will see.
Hopefully, you won't regret that!
The beautifully embellished monasteries were not just places
of prayer, they were also places of refuge, and many monastic orders
were involved in looking after the sick in the local community.
Ruth has come to the monastic herb garden to pick plants that
were believed to cure ailments common to the winter months.
This is my last chance to harvest the medicinal herbs
ready for the winter.
And this is a job that you'd have found going on in pretty much
every household all over Britain.
You needed a stock of household medicine to keep you going.
Medical knowledge in medieval times was quite limited,
relying on herbs and folklore remedies.
In about 1500, the Renaissance makes it to Britain, and what this
really is, is a rediscovering of Ancient Greek texts.
It was changing the way people understood the plants around them.
If you were to be an intellectual in 1500,
one of the forefronts of research was in plants.
The botany of this age was the science of the day.
Monasteries were often large complexes of gardens,
dormitories and areas for prayer.
All of these areas were rich in decoration.
Great tiled floors were costly and were another craft
that thrived thanks to the patronage of the Church and monasteries.
Peter has come to the abbey to meet with Karen Slade from the
Company Of Artisans who will help him make tiles for a church.
So, how do you make one? Well, you have to start with some clay.
Then you can take a wire and you can cut it from a block.
Wow!
And you can then wedge that up and put that into a tile frame.
So this is a frame that just helps you get everything the same size.
The tiles would then be decorated.
And so if you'd like to make a 1500s tile,
this one is a pattern from Hailes Abbey in Gloucester,
and was made in about, originally, in 1536.
So, that's a, a fleur-de-lis, is it? That's a fleur-de-lis, yes,
and the three petals that you see here, they symbolise
the Trinity, so you've got the Father, Son and Holy Ghost and a very popular symbol.
I'm also right in thinking that Henry VII adopted this?
Yes, he did, yes, he did. OK, so I just what, line this up?
Yes that's it, line it up nice and square. Over the clay.
That's it. And then you hit it with a hammer.
So, one... Now, am I hitting hard?
You hit it relatively hard, in the middle first and then each corner.
That's it, and then just
if you hit it just about there just to level it up.
That's it, brilliant.
And just have a look and see how that's come out.
Oh, there we are, that's perfect. Certainly ready to use.
The sunken areas on the pattern are filled in with another form of
clay known as slip, which will then turn yellow once glazed and fired.
And this is the only thing that they used to have to pay for. Right.
So, you can see how little I'm using compared with the red clay.
The red clay was free. Yeah. You can dig that up,
but this white clay isn't found in very many places, so it's precious.
And then, that's it? And then, that's it.
So, the next stage we need to do is to just
have a go at scraping off the surface now that it's stiff.
You're trying to get a clean edge in between the two colours.
So, if I just start with just this tiny piece at the top here,
just so that you can begin to see that lovely clean edge.
And how long does this take you? Oh, it takes ages.
Yeah. It takes about 20 minutes per tile.
I was going to say, the process of making a tile did seem
ridiculously fast and I knew there had to be a snag somewhere.
There is a snag, this is the snag. Yeah.
So if you want to have a little go, if you want to take over.
You just need to scrape it flat.
One thing I never thought I'd be doing was shaving a tile.
SHE LAUGHS
They will not know if the pattern has worked until it's been fired.
I think that one's almost done but... All right.
..that's not going to make an entire floor so we've got to crack on.
No, we have got a few more.
I know, you'd better get going, hadn't you?!
In Tudor England, the threat of fatal disease was ever present,
such as the sweating sickness and the bubonic plague.
The average life expectancy was just 35 years.
Herbs were used for treatments and it was important to store them
over the winter.
Ruth's using the hyssop she picked to attempt a Tudor remedy.
That's a load of honey.
And I'm just bruising the first of many batches of hyssop
and I'm going to seethe the hyssop in the honey.
Hyssop is one of those plants that was used really quite
extensively in the period.
It's not so much now. If you went to a modern herbalist
they wouldn't be all that impressed by using hyssop,
but, in 1500, it was considered to be an important medicinal plant.
Medieval medicine was based on the theory of the four humours.
It centred on the balance of four liquids in the body - blood,
phlegm, black bile and yellow bile.
Illnesses were believed to be caused by an imbalance of one
of these humours, and medicines would aim to restore the balance.
And every plant out there was assigned to
one of the particular humours, to a lesser, a more or less degree.
So hyssop, which is the one here, this is hot and dry,
it's ideal for counteracting, for balancing diseases of phlegm.
Anything where you have too much phlegm can be cured,
according to this Ancient Greek idea, by hyssop.
A spoonful of hyssop mixture mixed with hot water was
viewed as a useful remedy.
The infirmary was a space within a monastery where the elderly
and the infirm of the community could be cared for.
Whether they were there because simply of old age or, you know,
whether it was a particular ailment,
it was an area of the monastery that was heated, unlike the rest.
Monks were allowed to not take part in all the offices of the day
so that they wouldn't get too exhausted.
And they also were allowed to bypass some of the dietary rules.
There was a bed, there was warmth, there was food,
but more importantly, in the eyes of the 15th and 16th century,
there was spiritual care.
Under the reign of Henry VIII,
many of these monastic hospitals were closed.
In their place, came the civic and parish provisions
which laid the foundations for modern social welfare.
Peter and Karen have come to the church at Hailes Abbey to see
their tiles put into place on the reconstructed floor.
These looks a lot smaller than when we were making them?
Oh, yes, they do, they shrink quite a lot,
you have to think about that when you're making a pattern.
Oh, wonderful, look at that?
There we are, so...
We're bringing more tiles, it's looking pretty good that.
I mean, are they fairly quick to lay?
They're fairly quick to lay.
By using the lime screed to start with, that gives you a level base.
Right. And then you're simply just buttering on the bedding material,
so the tiles are going to be more or less flat anyway.
Tiles could feature the crests of the benefactors
paying for the floor, as funding works on religious buildings
was viewed as a way of avoiding Purgatory.
Other designs had more religious overtones.
So, this is our tile.
So, that's it after it's been scraped and then dried
and then fired with a glaze on top.
And the glaze has changed the colour from white,
pure white, to a yellow colour when they're fired.
So, are you happy with how it's come out? I think it's fantastic.
Good.
The distinctive yellow and red tiles were phased out from the 1540s,
with the influx of tilers from the continent bringing new styles.
All of a sudden, you've got wonderful Italian tilers
and French tilers and people from Holland making Delftware,
making blue and white. Yeah.
And as soon as people see blue and white tiles on the floor,
they don't want brown and yellow any more.
Suddenly, their floors are in HD(!)
That's it, they don't want them any more.
The final process is to use a dry mortar mixture of lime
and sand brushed over the tiles into the cracks.
Water is added to set the mixture and keep the tiles in place.
At the point of Dissolution, the large monastic houses were
still spending money on embellishments such as these
tiles or ornate stonework, and they really didn't see it coming.
In 1500, the monasteries under Henry VII were thriving,
even rivalling the power of the State.
But when his ambitious son, Henry VIII, came to the throne,
the new monarch came to resent the monasteries' power,
their wealth and their control from Rome.
The king also questioned the religious
purpose of the monasteries.
Influenced by ideas from Europe that monks no longer needed
to pray on behalf of society, individuals should now pray
directly to God to ensure their own salvation.
In the 1520s, the wheels were put in motion for the king to
break away from the Roman Church and dissolve the monasteries.
Professor James Clark, an expert in medieval history,
has come to discuss the Dissolution of the Monasteries.
I just find it utterly amazing
that so enormous a shift happened with remarkably little protest.
It is remarkable. This is carried out in four years or so.
They are, in fact, continuing to embellish their churches
and the buildings of the convent at the very
moment that the king's commissioners arrive.
There's one scene at one monastery where the king's commissioners
are literally picking their way over the trenches that
are being dug for the foundations of new walls and so on.
What was the impact to the wider society?
The institution that has really made
and shaped many people's living and working environment is removed.
Monasteries provided care for the sick
through hospital foundations, they had school foundations
and these are closed at the Dissolution.
This is uncharted territory for many village
and town communities across England.
The team's time as tenant farmers at the monastery is coming to an end.
The farmer's calendar was punctuated with religious festivals.
Earlier in the year, the team set up a religious guild, a group
that monitored its members' piety to ensure the salvation of their souls.
Guilds often put on mystery plays, a tradition that was to be
largely lost after the Dissolution of the Monasteries.
A representative from the guild would be in charge of organising
the play and recruiting locals to act and help build the sets.
The team are meeting with drama expert,
Dr Eleanor Lowe, to find out what's involved.
What do we mean by mystery play in the first place?
Well, the word mystery links to the Latin word "mysterium",
which means a guild or a craft,
so these plays were very much linked to the guilds who
were responsible for each of these plays.
And each of the guilds would be asked to put on their own
section of the story.
So, these mystery plays were a cycle of plays,
several different plays,
each of which told a sort of little snapshot moment from the Bible.
They tell a story of the Scriptures from the Creation,
right through to the Harrowing of Hell, yeah.
So, it's education and entertainment at the same time?
Absolutely, all at the same time.
Are we talking professional actors then or people giving it a go?
No. So, these are amateurs as part of the guild,
performing on the street in front of their fellow townspeople
and trying to communicate a message.
Ruth is in charge of making a popular Tudor drink for the audience
at the play, using forgotten fruits from the countryside.
Sugar was only known as a sort of rare spice in early
Tudor England, so you couldn't possibly make jam or bottle fruit
or any of those sorts of methods that,
later on in history, people used for preserving fruit through the winter.
No, in the 1490s, in 1500, fruit had to keep all by itself,
so what you were looking for
was varieties which would do exactly that.
As fruit was expensive to preserve,
any that could last for longer in the larder would be most welcome.
Bullaces are ripe on the bullace tree, a really ancient fruit,
one that sort of gets rather forgotten about these days.
They're a little sort of type of plum, a little bit sour,
but, I mean, you can eat them raw if you like sharp flavours.
A little bullace, being a more solid flesh, less watery sort
of a fruit, will keep for three or four weeks after it's been picked.
As tastes changed and sweeter varieties of plums
such as damsons became more popular,
the bullace plum was largely forgotten.
But what that means is it becomes something of an indicator species.
If you're out in the countryside
and you come across a great line of bullace trees,
you're almost certainly at the site of ancient settlement.
They're as much a part of our heritage as any church or
other building.
To impress the audience of the play,
guilds would pull out all the stops to produce a memorable performance.
Tom has come to see alchemist, Jack Green,
to experiment with making Tudor pyrotechnics.
Jack, it looks like you're about to start cooking here, we've got
pestles and mortars, got ingredients,
but this is actually what we're going to use to make Tudor fireworks. Fireworks, yes.
Although they had been used in China since the 10th century,
in England it was not until the 13th century that a churchman
called Roger Bacon first studied how to make fireworks.
So, Jack, what's our first ingredient?
Er, charcoal is what we need, no great cost.
Easy accessible? Yes.
This is basically the principle, to grind all the ingredients down...
Yes. ..and mix them, isn't it? Yes, so the finer you grind them,
the more intimately mixed they are, the more powerful is the fire.
Fireworks were produced by adding other minerals to the charcoal.
Like saltpetre.
So, what is saltpetre? Er, well, it's a salt,
and it's a salt that accumulates in manure heaps, it helped ignition.
There's also an element of risk creating gunpowder.
It's not something people wanted spread about, that knowledge?
The difference between a modern scientist,
a modern chemist and a medieval alchemist,
is that a modern chemist believes in publishing results,
alchemists had exactly the opposite attitude.
All alchemists wrote in code
and the fascination of alchemy is to work out what the symbols mean.
The Tudor period was the first time these ratios of ingredients
were studied, and gunpowder was made to be as explosive as possible.
Jack and Tom are trying their own ratios.
Put that there.
Very good, that goes in there, this is for filling. Funnel?
OK, this goes on top.
I do have a secret ingredient for this, I have here some gunpowder.
So, we'll put a little of it in.
And that goes down the bottom, does it? Yes.
That will make it finish with a flourish, you see.
Layers of the powders
need to be built up to create different effects.
Jack's experimental layer of gunpowder will,
hopefully, make it go with a bang.
And then a little more of this, it must be there by now, surely.
I don't know, you're the boss.
Well, you're the man with the eyes.
Now we put the fuse in...
..to start it off.
That should be good.
And there we have it. So, there we are, good luck for the mystery play.
Trust me, these are going to bring the house down.
I hope not!
Ruth is experimenting with an ancient recipe to make
an alcoholic refreshment for the audience to enjoy.
It will be made from the freshly picked bullaces.
Whenever people talk about monks and monasteries,
the word "mead" comes up.
Of course, the truth is that monks mostly drank beer,
and they drank an awful lot of beer.
But now and again, in party mode, there was
a little bit of mead floating around.
Your basic mead is just some honey and some water
and you allow it to ferment.
But if you flavoured it with fruit you called it melomel,
that's what this is.
So, I'm just crushing up the fruit in order to release the juice
and then that just goes straight in our brewing vessel.
And along with that, the honey.
Now, the more honey I use, the strong it'll be.
In we go and then...the water.
And that's it. You'll have noticed that I didn't wash the fruit first
and that's deliberate. I want the wild yeasts on the skin
of the fruit to be in there working, feeding on the sugars
from the fruit and from the honey,
quietly turning the water into alcohol.
That's basically it.
Ruth will leave it in the sun, allowing the fruit to ferment
and hopefully create a tasty drink.
It's the day of the mystery play.
Yeah!
CHEERING
For mankind shall dwell ever-more in bliss that never fails within.
Records give some details of how plays were put on,
and the team have converted a farmyard cart into a stage
from which these mobile plays would be performed across towns.
So, what's really interesting about these plays is that,
you know, they're very popular in the 14th, 15th century,
and then by the time we get to the 1590s, they've really been
censored out of fashion, and that's partly to do with
the Dissolution of the Monasteries because, of course,
they're very much tied up with the Catholic Church calendar.
Our dates, you princes of...
Guilds chose a play that reflected their interests.
Carpenters' guilds, as woodworkers,
would naturally put on the Crucifixion.
And the team's Farmers' Guild has chosen a play
centred on the salvation of souls by Jesus...
Oh, oh!
..The Harrowing of Hell.
Oh!
My brethren, I think our help is near and soon shall cease...
Mystery plays were similar in style to modern pantomimes.
He comes to...
Tom is playing Beelzebub, and the bad guy's arrival on stage is
marked in the same way it is today...
Oh!
..with a bang.
Oh!
Such uproar never was heard in Hell.
I am prince and principal, from here they shall not pass.
Oh!
Records of the plays show accounts of pulley systems
and elaborate sets being used.
Peter is in charge backstage, using whatever he has to hand.
They are there,
they survive the Dissolution itself, then they just sort of peter out...
They're sort of formed... ..a bit afterwards?
Yes, exactly.
And then in the 16th century, we get the foundation of the permanent
theatre structures, and professional theatre companies.
A curse afore I sink into my pit.
Oh, oh, oh!
Jesus has saved the souls and banished the Devil.
Lightning down.
Lightning off.
And the cloud of peace and love.
Here we go.
Praise his glory!
CHEERING
Well done, guys. Well done.
Sorry, Peter.
Awesome. That was brilliant. Well done, go take the praise.
BAGPIPES PLAY
The festivities will carry on for many hours
and Ruth's melomel has turned out to be a hit with the audience.
CHEERING
In 1534, Henry VIII made himself Supreme Head of the Church,
breaking away from Rome.
It marks the beginning of the end for the monasteries.
It would be the last time that religion and farming were
so entwined.
Over the course of the next four years, monasteries were pulled down,
their valuable land and materials stripped and sold off.
The great structures that had dominated
the landscape for centuries were left as empty shells.
They're really melancholy places these, aren't they?
We are standing in a monastic graveyard,
we are standing in the end of an era that was just so total.
It's important to remember
it's not just the loss of these buildings,
it's the social services that are lost by the monasteries
closing down, the education, the caring for the old and the sick,
the employment, and it takes near enough a generation to replace this.
But also I suppose monasteries are a victim of their own success.
They are these institutions
of wealth and power, of craft and industry,
of raw materials, and Henry VIII looked at them and says...
"I want that", Yeah. "I want that."
It is a lost age, you know, a lost past.
If you think what a huge turning point it was in our history.
It's the last day on the farm.
The boys have come to say goodbye to their faithful oxen,
Gwyn and Graceful, and give them their winter feed.
These girls have worked so well. Yeah, haven't they?
We have been a team, guys, you have been our farm.
You've done our ploughing, you've done our harrowing,
you've moved the carts of wool,
you've kept us in check, haven't you? They've harrowed ground.
And they really have been steady... performers, haven't they?
Yeah. That's the thing. Well, someone had to be!
Yeah, indeed.
They picked up the slack where we've let it go.
COW MOOS
Yes, you'll get some food in a second.
Going to miss you guys.
Without them, we couldn't have got half the stuff done,
and we built up a working relationship and...
It's a real insight in just how reliant the Tudor farmer
would have been on their livestock.
Without these guys, you don't have a farm.
Without a farm, you don't have a livelihood.
Well, it's been emotional.
Best of luck, girls.
In 1500, the monasteries had been at the peak of their power
and influence.
They were one of the largest landowners in England.
Controlling mines...
..waterways...
..and farms.
And holding a virtual monopoly over the wool trade.
I thought they were supposed to be white sheep, these ones?
LAUGHTER
They were the dominant spiritual and cultural focus in Tudor society.
The Dissolution transferred the power of the monasteries,
along with their land and wealth, to the Crown.
Some aspects of monastic authority would be taken over by the State
and private enterprise, others would simply disappear.
And the farming landscape of Britain was changed for ever.
Yeah, away!
PRAYER IN LATIN
ALL: Amen.
It's been amazing working on a Tudor monastery farm.
I mean turning up, it was just hustle, bustle,
the marketplace, everything was going on.
It was just idyllic.
Everything's been fun, but it's definitely been hard work.
You know, the weight's dropped off a little bit, you know,
a few aches and pains, bruises,
sores, but it's been fantastic, I wouldn't change anything.
I felt, this year, almost a sort of nostalgia that we were living
a life that was about to slip away.
This is such a pivotal moment,
it's like the deep breath that Britain takes,
ready, before it suddenly launches into a new way of living.