BBC Teach - Class Clips -5- What was life like in the court of Elizabeth I?

Based on Ian Mortimer’s popular ‘A Time Traveller’s guide to Elizabethan England’ series, these worksheets provide a useful note taking scaffold for KS3 and KS4 students. The set of resources could be used as a useful overview to the Edexcel 9:1 GCSE - Elizabethan England 1558 - 88 supporting the syllabus topics: Challenges to Elizabeth’s rule & Life in Elizabethan England. Each film clip is around 10 minutes in duration making them an ideal flipped learning task, starter or plenary activity.

Search - BBC Teach - Class Clips - KS3 History: What was life like in Elizabethan society?

The historian, Ian Mortimer, journeys back in time to find out what life was really like in the court of Elizabeth I. He starts at Hampton Court, one of twenty royal residences inherited by Elizabeth I. Here he discovers that appearance played a vital role at court helping to denote a person’s social status and whether they were of sufficient importance and wealth to be granted an audience with the Queen. He retraces Elizabeth’s royal progresses around the country and uncovers evidence that increasing numbers of people were becoming richer and using their new-found wealth to build their own manor houses. A visit from the monarch and her vast entourage would be a mixed blessing, the ultimate privilege and confirmation of the highest social status but also ruinously expensive.