When Elizabeth I is frustrated in politics, she boxes the ears of her ladies in waiting. Because the monarch has absolute power, over ministers and servants alike, the court is one of the most dangerous places to be. Many political careers finish on the block.

England is still recovering from the Black Death of a century and a half earlier. At least once a decade, there is a serious crop failure, often compounded by epidemics of disease – bubonic plague, pneumonia, smallpox and a viral disease called 'the sweat'.

Disease

High and low are equally affected by disease. Elizabeth I nearly dies of smallpox in 1562, and Lady Mary Sidney, who nursed the queen, is so pockmarked by the disease that she never shows her face in court again.

The first year of life is the most dangerous – one in every five newborn children dies before reaching its first birthday. About a quarter of children born between 1550 and 1600 fail to reach 10 years old. In the crowded London slums, mortality is even higher.

The Tudor century is the age of exploration, with more Europeans than ever before sailing all over the world. One of the things they export is European diseases such as smallpox. The New World may have struck back. Syphilis, a virulent form of yaws, appears in Europe soon after Christopher Columbus returns from his first voyage to America, and the 'pox' becomes epidemic in Italy by 1495.

Typhus comes to Europe from the Middle East and influenza from China. Leprosy is on the wane, but tuberculosis is rampant.

Personal hygiene is poor and most Tudor people are dirty and smelly. Beware of any road called Rose Alley – it's probably named after 'plucking a rose', the Elizabethan euphemism for urinating. Food takes up to four-fifths of an ordinary family's budget. The diet is generally rather basic: hunks of bread, coarse hard cheese, occasional meat and fish.

Most dwellings have dark and dingy interiors, lit by candles or rush torches, which are a big fire risk. There is no running water or proper drainage, and personal and domestic waste is dumped straight into the streets.

The poor live in homes that are little better than sheds. Usually, there is only one earthen-floored room downstairs for living and cooking; the upstairs loft is for sleeping in and storing hay. Peasants also keep animals in the house. Windows are shuttered and have no glass. Thatched roofs are a fire hazard and a nesting place for rats and insects.

Yeoman houses have some comforts – glass windows, chimneys, tiled roofs – but their servants sleep on straw mattresses in the kitchen.

Some things are slowly improving. By the 1580s, a few private houses are getting piped water supplies. In 1589, Sir John Harington of Kelston, Bath, installs the first water closet in his house.

Violence

Tudor England is a violent place. Many people have private arms, and nobles keep armed retinues. Duels are fought between swaggering swordsmen on points of honour – many people are very sensitive to the merest slights or insults.

Gangs roam the countryside. Riots are common. Murder rates are high and punishment is brutal. In prisons, people are 'kept lying in filthy straw, worse than any dog'.

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