Informal Entertainments and Personal Leisure Time

The love the early Tudors had for hunting is well documented, and therefore unsurprisingly purchases of hawks, hounds, crossbows, horses and other hunting accoutrements feature heavily in the books. Perhaps indicative of the importance of hawking in his life, the 6-8 falconers employed by the king personally at any one time were each named, served a number of years and occasionally even had their deaths noted in the Chamber Books. Peter Gumpter’s long tenure of service as head falconer has already been mentioned, and it is clear from the monthly salary lists in the chamber books that the other falconers served for a number of years. [172]

Every summer Henry VII, when not on progress or after he had been on progress, would visit his hunting lodges in Oxfordshire. Woodstock and Langley were favoured. Henry VII’s love of the hunt was well known, and consequently presents of hawks and hounds, particularly greyhounds, were frequent. Henry VII’s fondness for hare coursing grew as he got older and his health failed, and rewards to those that found hares for coursing (at a going rate of 3s 4d per hare) increased in his latter years.[173] His eyesight, as well as his health, inhibited his performance – in July 1507 the king paid 8d compensation for a ‘Cocke that the kinges grace kylled at Chesterford with his Crosbowe’, one assumes that the cock was not the intended target.[174]

Greyhounds were often received by the king as gifts, and would have been used for hunting and, of course, hare coursing. His favourite greyhound was called Launcelot, and is the only pet mentioned by name in the Chamber Books when his keeper received 4s in August 1500.[175] Launcelot may have been the recipient of one of two expensive collars, purchased for 40s in 1498.[176] It is likely that lesser favoured pets were not so lavishly dressed, as a payment for a leash and collars the year after amounted to only 2s 6d.[177]

As for indoor activities, both kings enjoyed chess, dice and cards. Henry VII was a keen player of cards, and payments for his playing money or to cover his costs are frequent, though rarely large. It is difficult to get a full picture of his spending on games, as his grooms, who often received his playing money on his behalf, may well have kept a ‘slush fund’ for such activities that was occasionally topped up.[178] Hence, although there are many payments to cover the king’s losses, it is impossible to gauge how successful a gambler he may have been as we lack information about his winnings, which were most likely retained by his closest servants for future use. Generally, his wagers were small, with the largest single expenditure at cards – £37 – occurring in 1496.[179] An uncharacteristic wager with ‘master Lovell’, presumably Thomas Lovell as opposed to his gardener of the same name, which cost the king £10, points potentially to a sense of good sportsmanship.[180] Losses at chess and dice were similarly recorded, though not with the same frequency as cards.[181]

Henry VII also had a fondness for tennis, both as a player and a spectator. Payments for tennis balls and arrangements for ‘tenesplay’ are common particularly in the 1490s.[182] A loss in 1494 to Sir Robert Curson in 1494 cost the king 27s; the opponent to whom he lost to in 1499 was perhaps of a lesser quality, as he received only 8s.[183] New opponents often received generous rewards, such as the 40s given to ‘a spanyard the tenes pleyer’ in 1494, slightly less generous than the £4 given to the ‘new pleyer at tenes’ in 1496. That these men were not named or previously known to the king suggests he was not fussy about the social standing of his opponent, only the quality of his game. The last payment for tennis appears in 1499, suggesting that perhaps the king no longer remained fit enough to play after this time.

Among the king’s victorious opponents in such activities was his son, the Duke of York, to whom he lost 6s 8d in 1498.[184] The young prince certainly acquired a taste for such play, and his expenses far outstripped those of his father. During the first three months of 1519, for example, he received a total of £270 in playing money which, given that by the time the privy purse, met most of the king’s sundry personal expenses, is unlikely to represent the full extent of his expenditure on game playing in this period.[185] The privy purse was kept by the king’s closest body servant, the Groom of the Stool, and its common usage from the earliest years of Henry VIII’s reign means that we lack many of the small personal details about his expenditure that enrich our knowledge of his father’s personal preferences and habits.