Life of a Commoner
Children and Lower Class Fashion
Lower-class families and children were not as concerned with their appearance. The average commoner was easily recognizable during this era. Men wore homemade garments, usually woven with wool or canvas. They wore hard-toed shoes with knit hose. Their outfits were not colorful, usually falling apart, and dirty from multiple wearings. While working on a farm, a man might wear loose cotton shirts, loose breeches, canvas leggings, and a sun-hat. Children, upper or lower class, wore similar clothing. Any child under the age of five wore long gown-like smocks, small aprons, and a bib and sun cap. As they grew, a child was dressed to look like smaller versions of their parents. Commoners and children had more important issues to be concerned about than fashion. |
Family
The nuclear family consisting only of a father, a mother, and their children made up the most common households in England, although very wealthy households sometimes included members of the extended family, such as aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents, and almost always included a large staff of live-in servants. Among farm laborers and craftspeople, families were viewed as working units. Each member of the family had a task. On a farm, a young boy might be in charge of shooing birds away from the crops, an older boy might herd sheep, and the wife was in charge of maintaining the home, feeding the family, and helping her husband with raising and harvesting the crops. Girls usually were trained by their mothers to help take care of the household. Similarly, families in the cloth industry often worked in their homes and divided up the labor of spinning and weaving the cloth. For working people, it was a time-honored tradition that the son would take on the same career as his father. There were few single people in Elizabethan England—all were expected to marry. In fact, women who did not marry were regarded with suspicion; some were even called witches. Married women were almost always homemakers, though poor women often had to work for pay as well. Almost all Elizabethans considered women to be inferior to |
The Role of Elizabethan Women Education -
The Elizabethan women who were commoners would not have attended school or received any formal type of education. Elizabethan women would have had to learn how to govern a household and become skilled in all housewifely duties. Her education would have been purely of the domestic nature in preparation for the only real career option for a girl - marriage! Single Elizabethan women were sometimes looked upon with suspicion. It was often the single women who were thought to be witches by their neighbors. All Elizabethan women would be expected to marry, and would be dependent on her male relatives throughout her life. http://www.william-shakespeare.info/elizabethan-women.htm
|