differences between Tudor town and nowaday's cities in the terms of life in the city
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Answer:
Life in the towns in Tudor and Stuart times
In the Tudor and Stuart times, 90 per cent of people still lived in the countryside. Despite this, the period has been described as the ‘golden age of the small town’. Towns served as a market place selling local produce and local inns provided accommodation for travellers. Leisure facilities such as theatres, coffee houses and race courses could also found there.
Chart showing the population distribution in England in 1600. London 250,000+, Norwich 20,000, Bristol 20,000, York 12,000, Exeter 9,000. Urban 10%, rural 90%.
Town life
Tudor towns were usually small by today’s standards, with only a few hundred houses.
They would have been similar to medieval towns in that they still often had walls around them and were by rivers for water and transport.
Like towns from the Middle Ages they were dirty and smelly with open sewers and rubbish thrown into the street. Rich people often carried a little bag of herbs called a pomander, but this could not prevent the spread of disease and plague.
Towns were the centre of buying and selling with the goods carried around in horse-drawn wagons along muddy roads.
Houses in the towns were squeezed into small places and so were built tall to gain more space. You might almost reach out over the street to your neighbour.
Below the house itself on street level there might be a shop facing the street. Some had workshops at the back. Signs would be hung up to show what was being made or sold as not many people could read.
In some towns the street names indicated what went on there: for example, the Shambles. They took their name from the benches that were used to butcher the meat. Perhaps you may know of a street in your town that has this name or similar ones.
Merchants' houses were built of stone and finely furnished. The houses of ordinary townspeople were timber-framed. Bricks were expensive and only used for the houses of the very wealthy.