At the Central Coast Renaissance Festival, we like to take our visitors back 450 years to Renaissance England. Luckily, it’s all pretend because you wouldn’t want the real thing.
The cobbled streets of Elizabethan London bustled with life—but beneath the vibrant tapestry of merchants, apprentices, and street performers lurked a grim truth: most would not live to see their fortieth year. In an era when reaching fifty marked one as an elder, existence was a relentless gauntlet of disease, danger, and backbreaking labor.
Babies entered a world where survival was far from guaranteed. Swaddled infants hung like laundry on wall pegs while mothers worked, vulnerable to the fevers and infections that claimed nearly a third of children before their fifth birthday. Even noble families were not spared—wealthy mothers handed newborns to wet nurses, where neglect or accidental smothering in shared beds ended many young lives.
Those who survived childhood faced new perils. Barber-surgeons doubled as dentists and doctors, extracting teeth with unwashed tools and treating plague sores with remedies like split chickens and dead pigeons. Under physicians’ care, the wealthy often fared worse than the poor, subjected to mercury tonics and bloodletting that weakened already fragile constitutions.
The cities themselves conspired against longevity. London’s streets ran thick with waste, its air choked by the stench of open sewers and rotting garbage. “Gong farmers” who emptied cesspits risked suffocation in the toxic fumes, while the Thames carried both commerce and contagion equally.
Daily labor wore bodies down to breaking points. Farmers developed crippling arthritis before thirty, their spines permanently bent from dawn-to-dusk toil. Apprentices endured fourteen-year indentures under the constant threat of the birch rod, while children as young as seven crawled through coal mines and chimney flues—many never emerging alive.
Even in death, the era showed no mercy. Paupers were buried naked in mass graves to save on linen costs, their remains mingling in anonymity. The wealthy might afford elaborate tombs, but their memorials carried the same sobering message etched into every memento mori trinket: life was fleeting and death ever-present.
As we recreate the pageantry of the Renaissance at our festival, let us remember the stark realities behind the velvet and armor. That turkey leg you enjoy? A luxury beyond most Tudor commoners’ wildest dreams. The armor you admire? Worn by men, often stunted by childhood malnutrition. This was a world where every day was a battle for survival—making the music, art, and revelry they created all the more remarkable.
So when the lute player strikes up a tune or the blacksmith demonstrates his craft, pause to consider: these were the sparks of joy illuminating an otherwise harsh existence. The Renaissance spirit we celebrate today is a testament to humanity’s enduring ability to find light even in the darkest times.
