1492: if Columbus had come here: When the New World was found, where stood England? Here, in an essay based on extensive interviews with experts on the period, Danny Danziger evokes the pleasures and pains of five centuries ago

This article is based on interviews with Professor Peter Clark, Dr Chris Dyer, Dr Steven Gunn, Dr Martin Ingram, Dr Roy Porter, Dr Ted Powell, Dr Jim Sharpe, Dr David Starkey and Dr Charles Webster. Historical adviser: Dr Christopher Tyerman.

Stopping here, instead of sailing on, Columbus would probably not have found the land of his dreams. The king, Henry VII, not personally especially attractive, had seen off Richard III at Bosworth Field and taken the throne. He was now busy trying to impose peace on a country used to constant fighting, mindful no doubt that four kings had been killed in the previous 100 years; there were plenty of people trying to lay hands on his throne.

The king did what he needed to. By canny use of the powers in his gift, he restricted the influence of the nobles, imposed himself on his unruly country and, with prodigious work and almost pathological attention to detail, centralised power in his own hands.

England was adrift from the heart of European culture, but new art and culture were starting to impinge. The king employed an Italian Latin secretary and the sculptor Pietro Tirrigiano worked extensively at the king's court. William Caxton, who introduced printing in 1477, had sown the seeds for the growth of literacy; the Renaissance, with its new knowledge and pleasures, did not happen here.

But, unlike the nations of Europe, England was united by a shared language and common law; a society of gross inequality and unchanging hierarchy held sway. It was not, however, a comfortable place.

If one thinks of England as placid now, one would not have thought so then. It was a society in which people had a low flash point, where crime was rife and where families took care to lock up their houses as well as their daughters.

Crowded it was certainly not; England was a country of 3 million souls, roughly half what it had been before the Black Death struck during the previous century; nine-tenths of the population lived in the country and, with the exception of London, the population of which was 60,000, towns were tiny compared with their European counterparts: Norwich, the second city, housed just over 10,000 people; Bristol and York slightly fewer; Newcastle, Exeter, Salisbury and Coventry about 5,000 each.

Then, as now, England was not a rich country by the highest European standards, although by the end of the 15th century, the small population and good harvests made it a great deal more comfortable than it had been before. In 1492, the English had a great deal to contend with.

Violence and disorder were at much higher levels than is regarded as tolerable today; the level of detection, arrest and conviction much lower. Gang rape was a normal part of a young man's growing up; also beating wives, children and servants was widespread. Animals were often cruelly treated; many were stoned or tortured to death for fun.

How was this dealt with? In villages, community policing. The principal police officer was the village constable, not a full-time professional but a local yeoman or substantial husbandman. A crime was committed, the hue and cry was raised and all able-bodied men were called out in search of the offender.

The most common punishment was a fine, especially for silly local offences: if you stole goods worth less than a shilling (5p) you would be whipped; but if you stole goods worth more than a shilling you were executed (a shilling was two or three days' wages for a labourer). Other capital offences included premeditated murder, rape, witchcraft, arson and burglary. Homosexuality and bestiality were usually seen as crimes against nature; in a number of places the animal would be executed as well as the human being.

Prison was very rarely used as a punishment in the modern sense. If you were sentenced to death you would be executed two or three days later. Execution and other forms of punishment were quite ornate; it was a familiar play and everyone knew their part. The criminal had usually been 'worked upon' (brought to a proper state of moral repentance by the clergy) and would often make a very stereotyped speech on the scaffold.

Publicising guilt and punishment was vital: branding was used on first-time offenders, usually on the inside of the hand on what was called the broad of the thumb. A number of English boroughs went in for 'carting', in which various forms of sex offender would be put on a cart and paraded round the town with people banging gongs in front of them. For whipping, you would be tied to a post, stripped to the waist (male or female) and whipped till you bled; stocks were mainly reserved for perjurers, cheats and people convicted of various forms of sedition.

The correction of 'immoral' behaviour fell under the jurisdiction of church courts and also brought public penance. Adultery, sex between unmarried people, pregnancy before marriage and drunkenness were all offences. If the accused were found guilty they had to confess in the presence of the congregation and often process round the church in white penitential garb. The system of communal surveillance which obtained did not stop people being adulterers and fornicators, but it did establish a framework of morality that people recognised.

Controlling this land or trying to where others before him had failed was the king in his peripatetic court; around it clustered the machinery of government. The centre was Westminster but the king was there for only 14 to 16 weeks a year. Otherwise the court was in one of a group of palaces: Greenwich, Eltham, Kennington, Richmond and Windsor - a sort of necklace round London.

It moved around for various reasons: the first was simply recreation, above all hunting; second, London killed people, particularly in the summer. Various forms of the plague and epidemic illness were around all the time.

Buildings became uninhabitable after six weeks: they stank to high heaven, and moving out was simply an opportunity to clean them.

The royal household was like a feeding machine with a series of departments attached to it. The full court would have between 1,000 and 1,500 people, including servants, almost the same size as a major provincial city of the time.

Even people of high status shared rooms. It wasn't really until Henry VIII built the very great palaces after 1530 that it was possible to accommodate everyone comfortably.

Upstairs was the king's private household. There was a succession of three rooms. The first one was the guard-chamber where the yeomen of the guard stood. The second was the presence chamber, where the king's throne was situated, called the Chair of Estate. The presence chamber was the main audience room, a sort of clubroom for the upper members of the court. There, everybody stood, and waited. A symbol of importance in an Arab country is that the royal prince will keep somebody waiting; the same was true in the Tudor court.

Beyond that was the privy chamber, where the king lived and was looked after. Dressing the king became an increasingly elaborate ritual, although performed privately: one of the inner privy chamber put on his shirt, his drawers would be pulled on, and his bottom wiped - the head of the Privy Chamber was the Groom of the Stool who actually wiped the royal bottom and was in charge of the king's chamberpot. In the Middle Ages, the more important you were the less you were ever alone.

The king and queen had separate households. The queen had her own suite of three apartments; everyone in it was female. The king and queen's bedchambers were connected by a gallery, so it was easy for the two to move together, but the notion that they spent every night of their happily married lives in a large double bed is utterly erroneous: they saw each other when they had to (not perhaps so unlike the upper classes and some royalty today). But relations between Henry VII and Elizabeth seem, in fact, to have been quite amicable. We have accounts of what happened after the death of their eldest son, Arthur, and there seems to have been the sort of breakdown into tears and mutual comforting that would be characteristic of any husband and wife whose promising eldest son had just died.

This, compared at least with what had gone before, was a goodish time to come here looking for food. The period 1440-1520 was one of outstanding plenty: grain prices never rose to as high a level as they did both before and in the late 16th century; people did not starve to death in the second half of the 15th century.

A craftsman's daily wage in 1490 was sixpence a day, an unskilled worker got about fourpence and for a gentleman's household the minimum income was pounds 10 a year. A big loaf of bread cost a farthing, a gallon of ale a penny halfpenny; you could buy a cooked chicken for two or three pence.

In the middle of the country and the South- east, where most people lived, they ate wheat bread, more attractive to look at and a lot tastier and easier to digest than the barley bread they had eaten when times were harder. Rye and oats were relegated to animal food and barley was used to brew ale.

There was a bit of ceremony at meals. Peasant households would be equipped with a tablecloth, towels, basins and ewers, suggesting that a hand-washing ceremony took place before the meal, as in an aristocratic household. The peasant's table usually had only one chair, so the head of the household would sit at the head of the table, with everyone else on stools and benches. If you went to someone's house, you would not be given a knife - you took your own. Everyone carried a knife in their purse. (The fork is a 17th-century invention.) Two meals a day was the norm; breakfast was not a peasant tradition. There was a huge meal about 11am, followed by another substantial one at 4 or 5pm. People would be in bed at 8pm.

There was more meat around than there had been: harvest workers were allowed a pound each day (there were cases of contracts stipulating that the meat had to hang over the edge of the plate). And there was plenty of offal - black and white pudding were eaten in profusion. Beef was the most important meat, followed by mutton for ordinary people.

There was lots of fish as it was obligatory on Fridays and Saturdays, and most people observed the rule that you had to eat fish on Wednesdays as well. With Lent, roughly half the days of the year were fish days.

You could buy preserved herrings and dried cod, called stock fish. Where a peasant might have one dish, an aristocratic household would have 10 or 12 at each meal, a great profusion of things - including cod, shellfish, skate and herrings - from which you would have a nibble at everything. Oysters were fairly common, while conger eel was a tremendous delicacy.

There was no division between sweet and savoury; they would mix sugar and pepper in the same dish. For example the recipe for making blancmange starts off with chicken and rabbit; you grind them up into a pulp and then you mix in sugar and milk of almonds and pepper and ginger.

The aristocracy flavoured its food very heavily with spices, large quantities of pepper and ginger and such things as aniseed and cloves, which were brought by the tens of pounds. Peasants were always associated with the smell of onions and garlic. Aristocrats did not eat the limited range of vegetables, considering them to be low-grade peasant stuff.

Between-meal snacks were called nuncheons. Building workers had nuncheons - a mason would have bread and cheese - as did monks, who enjoyed spiced cakes and spiced ale. And there was fast food to be had: cook shops sold pies, pasties and cooked chickens. In fact, you could buy complete meals; often a necessity in a busy craftman's household where the wife would help her husband and have no time for cooking. Ale was mostly made at home in tubs, and carted away in pails or

buckets.

Water was often contaminated, particularly in London. It also had a social stigma attached to it: people frequently said it was only the miserable French who drink water; the patriotic, true Englishman drank ale. This, made from malt, water and spices, unhopped and roughly the consistency of thick wheat porridge, was deemed the safe drink. Other drinks included something called broom ale, spiced and sugared ale, as well as ale made with apricots, blackberries, cherries - almost anything.

One of the best known was cock ale, 'beloved of whores and rogues'. It was prepared by steeping raisins, dates, nutmeg and a newly killed cock in a cask of beer.

By the end of the 15th century ale was starting to give way to beer: hops were being imported from the Continent and beer was more attractive and better-tasting, as well as cheaper to produce. Some beers were very strong, with such powerful herbs added that the drink became quite lethal.

Wine consumption and import fell off quite markedly as a result of the loss of the territories in France. Its high cost meant it was drunk at Court; everyone else drank beer. Even women and children drank - small ale or small beer, which tasted rather like a flat shandy.

People drank huge quantities. It was said that a skilled worker, such as a printer, might drink a gallon of beer a day. Expenditure on drink was one of the largest components in the family budget, accounting for 20-25 per cent.

In the late 15th century there were three types of establishment: inns, taverns and alehouses. Taverns, which were mainly confined to London, provided only drink and refreshment. Inns were bigger premises catering for better-off people, merchants, clergy, lawyers and gentlemen. Some of the inns that developed were very large indeed. The New Inn, built by the Monastery of St Peter, Gloucester - which is now a Berni Steak House - was the biggest building in the town apart from the Cathedral. And by the 17th century, some inns had 50-60 rooms, with stables that could house several hundred horses.

Inns were not too comfortable, however. There were plenty of bugs; you were likely to have to share your bed. There were no corridors, so you had to go through half a dozen rooms to get to your own. Privacy was not a high priority. Inns were very noisy, as they were used not only by the ever-increasing coach trade, but - as they took open markets as trading places - by growing numbers of people doing business.

Alehouses were the most common public buildings in the kingdom. In many hamlets where there was no parish church they were the main neighbourhood centre, and virtually everything to do with the community took place in and around the alehouse. Mostly it was someone's house, could be a cottage, could actually be their cellar or a back room or something like that; it was probably a one- or two-room affair, with a set of chairs around a big fire, and outside there would almost certainly be an ale-bench and, on display, a bush or a stick or pole with twigs fastened round to show that beer was being sold.

They had a fairly limited range of food serving bread and cheese - Welsh rarebit was quite a common thing - and sometimes pies. People could take in their own meat, which would then be cooked on the premises for them.

By the 16th century you got the development of indoor games - card games, skittles, gambling and dice-playing, dancing, of course, with minstrels and fiddlers, and outdoor games such as football and ninepins. Still, magistrates regarded such places as a threat: they were often centres of sedition, and encouraged promiscuity, idleness and disorder.

Pain threw a pall over Merrie England and if one could detect a melancholic cast of mind among folk, you could put it down to this. People regarded pain as almost a necessary component of being alive.

Smallpox was prevalent: a large number of people died of it and a woman with an unscarred complexion was a rarity. Most women used to plaster themselves with cosmetics; men would wear beards.

Typhus, an insect-borne fever, was common, and there were periodic outbreaks of malaria in low-lying or swampy areas, including London. There was also typhoid, which caused death within a few days, and serious outbreaks of something called sweating sickness, or 'the sweat', an extreme form of influenza.

Venereal disease was rife. People did not realise that the disease was spread through sexual intercourse, and the brothels that were a part of urban life throughout Europe acted as foci for the dissemination of disease.

Fleas and head or body lice abounded; people would wash parts of their body, but bathing the body as a whole was not common, so they were acutely infested. Even the upper classes in the Court were lousy, and their diaries mention this without any sense of embarrassment - they were always exchanging ideas on controlling lice and fleas.

They suffered very badly from gout, from bladder stones and gall stones. And they didn't realise that untreated water was a health threat; although they didn't drink water, they used it for cooking, and so often suffered from diarrhoeic diseases.

But the most common threat to life was giving birth. The chances of a baby dying, either in childbirth or within the first months of life was about one in three. Mothers, too, were at

serious risk.

Physical handicap, deformity, blindness and deafness were common. People drew their own teeth or went to the fairground to some itinerant dentist with pliers and no form of

anaesthetic.

Much folklore was quasi-magical; spells, amulets and charms were popular. There were notion of the sort, for example, that if you split an ash tree and passed a baby through the gap, and then bound the ash tree up, the child was meant to be healthy again.

Signs and symptoms of disorders were quite well understood, however: people identified different types of fever according to temperature levels, pulse rate, amount of sweat, and the colour of the skin, and were able to diagnose and make prognostications about the likelihood of recovery. Blood-letting also was common to rid the body of toxins.

If you went to medical school, you were taught the doctrine of the humours, which was not such a stupid way of thinking, partly because it explains certain of the visible features of the anatomy, the liquids that make up the body, blood and sweat and snot and shit and piss, things that come in and things that go out, and if you don't actually know about the nervous system or how the brain operates, a concentration on the balance or the imbalance of fluids makes very good sense.

To give them their due, medical men recognised their own therapeutic incompetence and did not pretend that they had panaceas: their job, they thought, was to teach people how to lead healthy lives. They were largely concerned with what they called 'regime' - diet, sleep and healthy lifestyles, and would dispense the sort of advice that people would sensibly give nowadays.

Columbus would have known the diseases. For it was a fact of life, not of England. Some of them he took with him. As for England, difficult as life was here, it had been worse. King Henry was beginning to forge the beginnings of a regime that would last; and if London was crowded, noisy and dangerous, as it was, one can only ask: what's new?