Historians Find Evidence of Recycling in Tudor Times

Historians have uncovered evidence of a remarkable recycling network in 16th-century England during the period of the Tudor monarchs.

The House of Tudor was a dynasty that held the English throne from 1485 to 1603, producing five monarchs, including iconic figures such as Henry VIII and Elizabeth I.

The recycling network involved rich fabrics and delicate embroidery seized from religious institutions closed by Henry VIII during the English Reformation.

The Reformation was a process by which the Church of England broke away from the authority of the Catholic Church over the course of the 16th century. This process, initiated by Henry VIII (who ruled the country from 1509 to 1547), eventually established the Protestant Church of England, with the English monarch becoming its supreme head.

Preliminary findings of a research project conducted by the U.K. National Trust and the University of Exeter have shown how textiles seized during the Reformation were saved and repurposed through a recycling network.

These seized textiles included church vestments—fine religious garments worn by clergy members—made in the earlier medieval period. The researchers found that the vestments made their way into Tudor society's homes and living spaces via a network that included government officials, merchants, craftspeople and extended families.

The project focuses primarily on a collection of fabrics held in Hardwick Hall, a country home in the Derbyshire region of England that once belonged to a notable woman, Elizabeth Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury (1527–1608).

Known as "Bess of Hardwick," she rose to the highest levels of English society through a series of elite marriages and died as one of the wealthiest women in England. Notably, Bess amassed a vast collection that included numerous examples of tapestries, embroideries and other textiles, which she used to decorate her mansion houses.

"What can be seen so vividly at Hardwick, was part of an impulse to recover, conserve and recycle that was shared in Tudor households countrywide," James Clark, the lead researcher on the project from Exeter's Department of Archaeology and History, said in a press release.

"Across the country, there was an excited scramble for bargains and cultural souvenirs put up for sale as part of the dismantling, dispersal and destruction of the interior decorations of hundreds of churches. Textiles were among the most popular and sought-after of all of these treasures, in part because of the quality of England's church vestments—a combination of rare Italian fabrics and insular embroidery skill—but also because such fine, well-crafted pieces clearly had so many years' use left in them."

The textile collection amassed by Bess has traditionally been seen as a conspicuous attempt to display her wealth and position herself at the top of Tudor society. But the latest project suggests the reality is more nuanced: the researchers say the textiles represent an expression of Bess's creative ingenuity in which she created fashionable new decorations from second-hand materials, continuing a long tradition of recycling and up-cycling.

Some textiles, for example, consist of fabrics and figures cut from older pieces made for quite a different purpose.

"[One] insight [of the research project] is the inventiveness of this recycling. Medieval textiles were reused for almost any kind of sewn material, decorations, furnishings, etcetera," Clark told Newsweek.

The research project has also uncovered evidence that this recycling was not a practice that only the elites of Tudor society, like Bess, engaged in.

"Perhaps the main finding is the scale of this effort to recover and reuse medieval material in the Tudor period," Clark said. "It was not a practice confined to the social elite but in fact was shared across the social scale: rich and poor were all eager to hold on to the fabric of the medieval past even if they wanted to discard its religious beliefs."

"The trail of contemporary documents and of surviving fabric fragments has revealed that the nationwide turnout of church vestries provoked a general enthusiasm for trading in and recycling old textiles," Emma Slocombe, a senior curator at the National Trust, said in the press release.

"With many monasteries wound up by the spring of 1540, and chantry chapels compelled to close by the end of the decade, there was a glut of vestments. While the great and the good went in pursuit of precious fabrics and the finest forms of decoration, there were any number of simpler pieces to be had at a modest price."

The findings shed new light on Tudor society, suggesting that while there was great enthusiasm for new fashions and styles during the period, people in this period also valued the craftsmanship of the past.

"[They] clearly hated to see costly materials and quality craft be wasted. It was not so much a case of 'make do and mend' as 'conserve and create, again,'" Clark said in the press release.

"The implications of this research are: that we need to rethink the Tudors' attitude to the past, and even to the church and religious system that they tore down. They were strongly attached to material and visual experience of that old world despite their rejection of its ideology," Clark told Newsweek.

"Also, this research challenges us to reconsider the relationship between material culture and religious faith itself. Clearly it was possible to be a Tudor Protestant and yet to value the material of the medieval Catholic Church."

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Update 12/29/23, 5:39 a.m. ET: This article was updated with comments from James Clark.