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The Tudors were a royal family reigning in Britain between 1485 and1603. Their names and the order in which they reigned:

• Henry VII – 1485-1509
• Henry VIII – 1509-1547
• Edward VI – 1547-1553
• Mary I – 1553-1558
• Elizabeth I – 1558-1603

Did you know?

Lady Jane Grey reigned for nine days in 1553. Jane was a great-granddaughter of Henry VII through his youngest daughter, Mary. Edward VI chose Jane to be queen after he died because he didn't want his half-sister, Mary, to reign because she was Catholic. However, Mary became queen and Jane was executed. Not everyone considers Lady Jane Gray to be one of the Tudors.

Before Henry Tudor became king he had to win the crown from King Richard III. He succeeded in doing this in the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 at the end of a bloody civil war called the Wars of the Roses.

The Wars of the Roses were a war between two families – the House of Lancaster (Henry Tudor) and the House of York (Richard III). The reason they were fighting was that both families wanted the crown.

But where did the name for the war come from?

The House of Lancaster was represented by the sign of red rose. The House of York was represented by a white rose.

During the Battle of Bosworth Field, Henry was able to defeat Richard III with help from Welsh soldiers.

Henry Tudor had friends from all over Wales – after all, he was born at Pembroke Castle and grew up in Raglan. Her grandfather Owen Tudor was from Penmynydd on Anglesey.

After winning the crown, Henry Tudor became king of England. And the civil war – the Wars of the Roses – ended after 30 years.

Henry Tudor married, or Henry VII as he was known, Elizabeth. Henry belonged to the House of Lancaster and Elizabeth belonged to the House of York. By getting married, Henry successfully joined both sides, and ensured that he kept the crown on his head.

To show this important unity, Henry added five white petals to the centre of a red rose to create a brand-new sign. This rose was called a Tudor Rose.

The Welsh were happy when Henry Tudor won the battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 and was crowned Henry VII, the king of England and Wales. After all, he was of Welsh blood.

As a result, many Welshmen were very interested in the Tudor court in London. In order to “get on in the world”, they would often anglicise their names, for example:

• Ieuan ap Dafydd > John Davies
• Huw ap Hywel > Hugh Powell

Tudor Society

The breeding of cattle and sheep on their large estates was the main subsistence of the nobility in Wales in Tudor times. Thousands of cattle would be driven to London markets. This would bring large amounts of cash to farmers. Sheep were mainly kept for their wool, and the textile industry was prosperous.

Under the nobility were small farmers who were scraping a living. They would grow their own food and sell the very little left to pay the rent, tithe and local taxes.

Underneath them, the working class lived frugally on bread, porridge, oat bread, cheese and poached rabbits. Shortages, sickness and death were a daily reality for them.

At the bottom of the social ladder there were the poor and the vagrant. During the Tudor era, they differentiated between the poor who deserved help – the sick and the infirm – and those they thought were lazy and not deserving of help. They would be punished by being whipped in public and driven back to the areas where they were born.

But, although life was rough and hard, the folk still enjoyed traditional customs, for example:

• dancing around the maypole
• playing bando and cnapan
• playing cruel sports such as cockfighting

Everyday life

Life was very different during Tudor times.

In Wales, most people lived in the country in long houses. The family lived in one side of the house and the animals lived in the other side.

Housework was hard. There was no clean water available in people’s houses as there is today. So, people had to collect water from the river.

That meant they didn’t have a bath very often. And there were no toilets. People used buckets and had to get rid of their waste outside their houses. This meant that people often became ill.

But the Tudors completely changed houses with something very important, the chimney.

Life was much more enjoyable when people added a chimney to their houses. For the first time, ordinary houses were able to be built with a second floor. That meant that people had more space and privacy upstairs, rather than living on top of each other on the ground floor.

After the death of Henry VII, his son Henry VIII became king. Henry VIII was famous for having six wives:

1. Catherine of Aragon - divorce
2. Ann Boleyn - beheaded
3. Jane Seymour - died while she was married to Henry
4. Ann of Cleves - divorce
5. Catherine Howard - beheaded
6. Catherine Parr - died after Henry died

As he died, Henry Tudor asked his son, Henry VIII, to care for Wales and, indeed, during his reign (1509-47), major changes occurred in Wales.

There was a lot of chaos in the country at the time, but Henry VIII needed order to be able to impress his religion – Protestantism – onto his people.

That is why the Acts of Union between England and Wales were passed by the English parliament in 1536 and 1543.

The purpose of the Acts of Union was to try and remove the differences between the two countries and ensure a single language, the same practices and the same administration.

The Acts:

• divided Wales into 13 counties
• gave 27 members of parliament to Wales
• removed the old Welsh laws and replaced them with English laws
• established courts to help maintain law and order
• made English the only official language of Wales

All courts of law in Wales had to conduct everything through the medium of English. From then on, Welsh would be a second-rate, unofficial language in its own country.

Religion was very important to people in the Tudor Age, but there was a great deal of religious disagreement.

During Henry VIII’s reign Protestant supporters sought to remove the Roman Catholic Church from the country.

Everyone had to go to the same church as the King or Queen, or they would be arrested, imprisoned or even killed.

When the Protestant, King Edward VI (1547-53), and his Catholic sister Mary Tudor (1553-8) reigned, England moved from one faith to another. But the Welsh stood firm, without fully supporting either faith.

In Wales in the Tudor Age, most people spoke only Welsh. Not many people could speak English at that time.

Services in the Roman Catholic Church were conducted through the medium of Latin. But only people who had received an education could speak Latin. So following a Roman Catholic service would have been impossible for most people.

In the small parish churches, the new language of services was English, not Latin. They used the English Bible and new English prayer book, but many of the Welsh could not understand the language.

1588 is an important year in Welsh history, as this is when William Morgan’s translation of the Bible into Welsh was first published.

Queen Elizabeth I was said to be able to speak Welsh. She believed that it would be good if the Welsh could worship in their own language.

William Salesbury translated the Book of Common Prayer and New Testament by 1567.

But William Morgan was the one to complete the translation of the whole Bible into Welsh in 1588.

Prior to this, since 1536, there was no right to use Welsh in official situations, so having a Bible in Welsh was a very good thing for the status of the Welsh language. Indeed, many believe that this is the reason why the Welsh language has survived to this day.

Elizabeth I didn’t marry and she had no children, so she had no direct heir. Nobody was sure who would reign after she died.

In the end, when Elizabeth died in 1603, her cousin James I of Scotland became king.

This is how the Tudor era came to an end. Scotland joined England and Wales, and a new royal family came to power, the Stuarts.