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Popular Culture in Jamestown and England |
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Popular Culture in Jamestown and England |
Set:
Objectives:
1. Students will answer questions relating to the information on either Elizabethan popular culture in England or popular culture on Jamestown during the same time period.
2. Students will compare and contrast the differences in popular culture in England and in Jamestown.
3. Students analyze the information on popular culture and compare the information to socio-economic status of the people living in both England and Jamestown.
4. Students will create and act out a scene of popular culture from either Jamestown or London, England.
5. Students will compare the leisure activities of England and Jamestown to their leisure activities.
Rationale:
By evaluating the information and then using the information to create a play, students will gain a fresh perspective on life in England and in Jamestown during the 1600's.
Involvement of Learner:
Explanation:
A.
1. Instructor will state purpose of lesson to the students. The purpose of the lesson being: "How do the leisure activities of Englishmen in Great Britain and colonists in Jamestown differ?" (See "Rationale" paragraph)
2. Instructor will give a brief overview of student leisure activities on the board.
B.
1. The students will be assigned a role within their group. The instructor may assign these roles himself, or allow the students to assign the roles themselves. One person will be the recorder, and record ideas that the group may have; this paper with the ideas and names of all the group members will be collected at the end. Another student should be the group "reader" and actually read the material given to the entire group. Another student should be a time keeper to tell the group how much time is left. Another student may be a on-task supervisior to make sure the group stays on-task. One student to three students may be the spokeperson/ people of the group. These group "leaders" will speak for the group to the teacher and the entire class once the information is read and the questions are discussed.
NOTE: The instructor should pick up the recorder's paper(s) with the groups answers and the names of each person in the group at the end of the lesson.
2. Each group's "reader" will read information presented about his or her specific group.
3. In the group work, students should look at the information presented on popular culture. Group work should take the form of answering the following questions and take anywhere from 20-40 minutes. During this time, the instructor should go from one group to the other and make sure that the students don't have any questions about what is expected of them.
4. The instructor will write the four questions to be answered by the groups on the board which will serve to compare and contrast England and Jamestown at the end of group work.
Question 1: What are the leisure activities of your group?
Question 2: Do all people located in England (or "Jamestown" if it's the Jamestown group) share the same leisure activities?
Question 3: Do these leisure activities and popular food and drink differ between different classes of people or personal preferences?
Question 4: Do you think that the other group will share the same leisure activities or normal everyday activities that your group does? Why or why not?
C.
1. Students will come back together after examining their material and one group at a time will have their "leaders" discuss the answers to the questions within the entire class. Instructor may monitor the discussion and allow interaction between groups or different opinions.
2. During the "Closure" session class should stay within their groups and discuss the popular culture of both Jamestown and England with one another and the instructor.
Closure:
A. Literal Questions:
1. What class of people are most likely to leave England for Jamestown?
2. Does England or Jamestown have more religious leanings in popular culture? Which country's religion more directly affects its leisure activities?
B. Interpretive Questions:
1. What differences are there between England's popular culture versus Jamestown popular culture?
2. What leisure activities, if any, do these two different places share?
3. What leisure activities are most closely related to your idea of fun leisure activities? Jamestown or England?
C. Evaluative Questions:
1. Knowing that both England and Jamestown are composed of Englishmen, why does the popular culture of the two places differ?
2. Do you think that the economic status of the people in Jamestown and England influenced their leisure activities/ popular culture?
3. Does Jamestown develop a separate popular culture away from England?
For Homework:
The instructor will already have the groups still separated. The instructor will give out the following homework assignment, written on the board:
It is New Year's Eve in Jamestown/ London, England. Half of your group are upper-class individuals in the colony/ city. The other half are lower-class individuals. In the last few minutes of class, decide which half of your groups will be the upper-class and which will be the lower-class. NOTE: Be creative! The lower-classes may want to be beggars! The upper-class may want to be a queen or a famous individual. For homework: Create a character to become for the next class period. Are you rich or poor? A man or a woman? And most importantly: what are you doing as a leisure activity on this New Year's Eve? Be as specific as possible.
During the next class, we will stay within these groups and each group will create an act of a play in keeping with the early 17th century tradition of popular culture. Each group will write their act of the play (each act will be no longer than five or six pages). At the end, each student will come to class dressed as their character, and the two acts will come together and each group will act out their character and their written act of the play, entitled: New Year's Eve in Mighty England and Jamestown.
England's Popular Culture:
During the Elizabethan Age in England, the upper-classes were to be admired. In London especially there was much emphasis placed on the upper-classes and the plays of Shakespeare. There was much disdain for the lower-classes, particularly in the cities. The English government was concerned about the unruliness of people who had too much time on their hands, but in England during the late 1500 and early 1600's experiences a population explosion. In order to curb the lack of jobs available, Englishmen were required to work at only one job or discipline. However, there was still large scale unemployment.
Plays were the main source of entertainment in England during the early days of colonization, since not all Englishmen particularly in the countryside, were literate. All plays, but especially Shakespeare's plays, were very popular. However, many devout religious Englishmen, including the Puritans, thought that these plays drew people away from the church and God.
For the poor who could not afford to go into the city theaters, many would sit outside and sing for money during intermission and after the play was over. The upper-classes looked down on such beggars.
In the countryside, there was much drinking and hospitality, more so than in the city since many country "maids" and men tended to be less wealthy than their city counterparts. Local plays were also entertainment here, and dances as well as drinking captured the fancy of the country folk, especially drinking. As one women put it: "Tell them you're thirsty in London, and they'll give you a glass of water."
For those who were literate, reading was also a major source of leisure activities. Love stories and poems about love were popular during this time. Ballads or songs that told stories were the most popular with Englishmen.
As for food and drink, in the 1600's England had food that was in some ways different than what we think of as English food today. For breakfast, Englishmen would have a roll and some strong tea or coffee. For lunch, cheese and break with beer was a stable meal. The biggest meal, supper, consisted of only meat, with occasionally some vegetables, depending on the wealth of the consumer. Alcohol in the form of beer or wine was popular, especially in the country side. this is most likely because of sickness caused from bad water, though during the 1600's Englishmen had no medical knowledge about germs and bacteria in certain water sources.
(Courtesy of Leonard Ashley's [1988]. Elizabethan Popular Culture)
Jamestown Popular Culture
The popular culture of Jamestown, especially in the early 1600's, is difficult to decipher due to little records about leisure activities. What historians do know is that the popular culture in Jamestown and England was very much linked in the early 1600's. However the people involved were very different.
Jamestown was a colony built as a means to quick economic profit. Only after seventeen years of starvation and disease and no gold did the colonists begin to make adjustments for a permanent settlement. There were very few women in Jamestown. Even when women first came over to the colony, as early as 1609 though few survived, there was more emphasis on surviving than in leisure activities. Only after 1624 does Jamestown show signs of a permanent colony.
Jamestown, through effective leadership, began to grow crops and stabilize the colony. Although the colonists built a church as the first monument in the new colony, making a profit was in the minds of most colonists. Many of the colonists who came over were poor, serving the Virginia Company for seven years before having land of their own. Storms also stopped supplies from reaching Virginia, but once supplies came to Jamestown on a regular basis, alcohol was a valuable commodity.
Before the discovery of tobacco, many colonists actually bowled in the streets to pass time. There was much drinking and leisure time, but once tobacco was discovered to be profitable, the streets were filled with the tobacco plants and gone were the days of free public bowling alleys. Many planters, though no poor Englishmen who were indentured servants, began turning huge profits from the tobacco plants when they were shipped to England. On weekends, the richer colonists would take almost all of their "promissory notes" from tobacco and spend their credit on alcohol and food. Later,"drinking boats" with plenty of alcohol and gambling became a way to spend time on the weekends.
Singing, especially creating drunken numbers, was common, and there were scholarly men who settled in Jamestown for a time. Some of the most notable members of the Jamestown colonists, John Smith and Berkeley for example, wrote books about the New World in their spare time.
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