When we got to the park we saw the mansion. It was built on the top of a hill so every person could see it and know that the owners were very wealthy. (It was built by Sir Francis Willoughby in 1494 and it cost him £8,000 to build the whole house.)
When we got there, we were met by a maid wearing a hat tied under her neck and a green dress. She came to the door and welcomed us in kindly and told us to come in.
Later we met Lady Willoughby. She spoke in a posh way and was very polite. She was dressed in a long black and purple dress. She had a ruff around her neck and wore an unusual hat and long yellow gloves.
First we went into a room to write with quills. We had to write in fancy Tudor writing. The letters had curls on the bottom and we had to dip the quills in black ink. The ink was in a little pot. We all wrote a sentences about queen Elizabeth - I wrote that Queen Elizabeth's nose was a little hooked.
One of the best parts of the day was the Tudor Feast.
We had to wait on the main stairs until twleve bells and then we went into the Great Hall. The table was in a big U-shape. All the girls sat on one side and all the boys sat on the other side because in Tudor times the men sat apart from the women. There was a prayer and then we could eat our dinner. We had a slice of bread and a chunk of cheese (We could not eat it like a sandwich - we had to have a bite of bread and then a bite if cheese.) After that we had flapjacks or shortbread and apples or grapes. We had apple juice or water to drink out of little brown beakers with two handles.
We tested out some different spices. they were called aniseed, nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon and ginger. We tasted some and the others we smelled. (Some people spat out the spices we had to taste!) The lady who told us what the spices were said that cinnamon would go up your nose if you sniffed them to much. The spices were used to stop the food tasting bad.