The Siege of Wolfenbüttel, by Lucas Cranach the YoungerChristopher asked, “Would a wall tent be accurate for a 16thC persona? … Karen, is there a page on your site with tent links that I haven’t found?”

Nope, sorry. Sven Skildbiter had a good Geocities page with images of tents broken down by the various centuries in which they were created – but I felt that it, along with pages like Medieval Pavilion Resources and Surviving Medieval Pictures of Tents and Pavilions, covered the topic pretty well. I’ve got a very short page of links to illustrations of people setting up tents, though; and for temporary tent-like shelters at markets, there’s the linkspage of merchants’ booths, too.

Here’s some images of 16th century tents, in various contexts, from Renaissance-era artwork and illustrations.

Here is a description of a tent that was part of part of the entertainment unto the Queen’s Majesty at Killingworth Castle in Warwickshire in this summer’s progress, 1575:

But being here now in magnificence and matters of greatness, it falls well to mind: the greatness of his Honour’s tent, that for her Majesty’s dining was pight at Long Itchington the day her Highness came to Killingworth Castle — a tabernacle indeed for number and shift of large and goodly rooms, for fair and easy offices, both inward and outward all so likesome in order and eyesight that justly for dignity may be comparable with a beautiful palace, and for greatness and quantity with a proper town or rather a citadel. But to be short, lest I keep you too long from the Royal Exchange now, and to cause you conceive much matter in fewest words, the iron bedstead of Og the King of Basan (ye wot) was four yards and a half long and two yards wide, whereby ye consider a giant of a great proportion was he. This tent had seven cart-load of pins pertaining to it; now for the greatness, guess as ye can.

Well, that’s a modern English version of the letter; it’s also in Volume 1 of Nichols’ Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, if you want to read the original. But the Progresses also provide several other descriptions of occasions at which tents were used. For example, a hunt, from the entertainment of the Ambassador to the Landgrave of Hessen: “From the castle we passed a league downe the forrest into an open vallie, where, the length of half an English mile, the toyles were set up on both sides to keepe in the game: the pleasure of the place was as much as the sport; for we were in sight of divers towns and villages, as Quiddelburge, Rottam, Kellam, &c. and from the hill Schoneberg (a faire hill) out of the wood, fell the game downe into the vallie, where in the middest was a greene tent of cloth.”