Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors

In 1547, Parliament passed a law saying that if you refused to work, even for nothing but food, you could be branded and handed over as a slave for two years. Your children could be taken. They repealed it in two years. Not because anyone softened toward the poor, but because barely anybody would enforce it. This episode is about how England spent the sixteenth century building a welfare system and a punishment regime at exactly the same time, out of exactly the same panic, and usually in the same paragraph of the same statute. It's about a country whose money was getting worse and whose food was getting dearer, with no concept of inflation to explain any of it. It's about the parish accounts where the same neighbours who paid for a dying woman's shroud also paid to have a sick stranger carried over the boundary before he could die on their books. And it's about Thomas Harman, a Kentish magistrate who in 1566 published a bestselling exposé of fake beggars, complete with a dictionary of their secret criminal slang, and more or less invented a character we are still arguing about today. The law they finally landed on in 1601 stood until 1834. Two hundred and thirty three years.

A woman is found at the bottom of a staircase in 1560. And the one person who benefits most from it is the Queen of England. This week I'm digging into one of the wildest what-ifs in Tudor history. Amy Robsart, wife of Robert Dudley, dies suddenly at Cumnor Place, right when the rumors were already swirling that Dudley meant to get rid of her so he could marry Elizabeth I. The obstacle is gone. The queen could have married the man she loved. And she said no anyway. I wanted to know what would have happened if she'd said yes. Turns out it touches everything, her entire approach to foreign policy, the Mary Queen of Scots plots, even whether she'd ever have had to sign that execution warrant. There's no clean answer here, and that's what makes it such a good one. Also, quick note, I've built an app called Tudor Scroll. Daily Tudor puzzle, all your favorite Tudor creators in one feed, and more. Android testers are in now (thank you all so much) and iPhone is about to go into final App Store testing. Want in early? Email heather@englandcast.com. Related episodes: Jill McCracken on her murder mystery podcast https://youtu.be/yplUI7pbEWY Janet Wertman on the woman who had Robert Dudley's baby: https://youtu.be/2UEyw4q_dto Tudor Times' Melita Thomas on Robert Dudley: https://youtu.be/Bot35V6CPCo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There is a Catholic saint whose actual job, canonized and everything, is patron of magic tricks. Escapologists. Illusionists. And he earned it the hard way: by spending nearly twenty years building hiding places so good that people still can't find them today, standing right next to them, with a guidebook in hand. Nicholas Owen was a small, injured, entirely unremarkable-looking carpenter. He was also the most important man in Elizabethan and Jacobean England's Catholic underground, a one-man counter-surveillance operation who broke a priest out of the Tower of London, built hides that beat the hunters' own measuring tricks, and kept every single location locked in his head so it could never be tortured out of anyone else. This is his story, the arms race he ran against the state, the night at Hindlip Hall when the escape artist chose to appear instead of vanish, and what happened to him in the Tower afterward. Plus: a heads up on a free live illumination workshop I'm doing tomorrow with the wonderful Julia Bangert, teaching you to paint a Tudor rose in true medieval style. Link below.

FREE ILLUMINATION WORKSHOP Royal Letters: How to Paint a Tudor Rose Initial, with illuminator Julia Bangert. Tuesday. Free, total beginners genuinely welcome, and if you can't make it live, register anyway and we'll send you the recording. https://page.co/kxj56n Somebody is knocking on your door. You know who it is. And upstairs, folded into a hole in the wall behind your fireplace, is a man whose presence in your house can get you killed.Last time I told you about John Gerard, the Jesuit who escaped the Tower of London on a rope. But Gerard had to sleep somewhere. He had to say Mass somewhere. He had to hide somewhere. And house after house after house, the person answering the door was a woman. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1588, a tall, well-dressed gentleman rode through Norfolk talking about hawks with anyone who'd listen. He had a gilt-handled rapier, excellent French, and impeccable manners. He also had a Mass kit hidden in his saddlebags and a hair shirt under his doublet, because he was a Jesuit priest in a country where that was a capital offense. John Gerard spent seventeen years running an underground network across Elizabethan England. He built safe houses, ran couriers, sent at least thirty men abroad to train for the priesthood, and stayed one step ahead of Walsingham's intelligence apparatus. When they finally caught him in 1594, they hung him by his wrists in a Tower of London dungeon to make him give up the head of the Jesuit mission. He fainted eight or nine times in a single day. He never gave them a name. Then he wrote to his friends in invisible ink made from orange juice, and escaped from the Tower on a rope strung across the moat, with hands so ruined by torture he could barely grip it. And then he went straight back to work for another eight years. This is his story, and almost all of it comes from his own account, which he wrote as a field manual for the young men who'd be following him into England. FREE ILLUMINATION WORKSHOP Royal Letters: How to Paint a Tudor Rose Initial, with illuminator Julia Bangert. Monday, July 21, 12pm Eastern. Free to attend, total beginners welcome, and if you can't make it live, register anyway and we'll send you the recording.https://page.co/kxj56n Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sign up for the weekly newsletter here: https://englandcast.com/newsletter-sign-up Everyone knows Henry VIII's divorce saga. He wanted out, the Pope said no, he invented a new church. Problem solved, if you're the king. But what about his wives? What about any Tudor woman trapped in a terrible marriage? Could she leave? The answer is technically yes. There were legal mechanisms: annulment, formal separation, informal arrangements. The Church courts were open for business. The catch is that the system was designed to be so narrow, so expensive, and so humiliating that most women couldn't use it. Life-threatening cruelty wasn't enough. Even proving your husband was impotent required a process so invasive it makes modern divorce paperwork look like a spa day. And then there's Margaret Tudor, Henry VIII's own sister, who wrote him a desperate letter in 1518 saying she knew her husband didn't love her, as he showed her daily. Henry wrote back telling her marriage was divinely ordained and sent her a nice dress. He would later break with Rome rather than stay in a marriage he didn't want. But that's different. He was the king. This week we're looking at what leaving actually meant for Tudor women: the options, the obstacles, and the staggering gap between what the law technically allowed and what was practically possible. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1552, England's teenage Protestant king decided that St. George, patron saint of England, had to go. Not from one town, or one church. From the statutes of the Order of the Garter itself, the most prestigious knighthood in the country, the one his grandfather had endowed with a jewel-encrusted gold statue and his father had basically built his entire personal brand around. The manuscript still exists. Edward VI's own handwriting is in the margins, correcting his chief minister's draft. He was fifteen. This is the story of a boy king who believed he was saving souls by rewriting a 200-year-old institution, the nine days that upended everything after his death, and a queen who found the evidence and ordered it sponged from the historical record so thoroughly that "no memorial might be transmitted to posterity." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Want to test the new Tudor Scrolls app? Email me at heather@englandcast.com. She was the granddaughter of a king, married off at thirteen to settle a debt, and somehow ended up as the only woman to ever run the Tower of London. And then, a few months later, she was a prisoner inside the same walls she used to command. But this isn't just one woman's unbelievable life. Eleanor had two sisters, and once you line all three of them up next to each other, you stop seeing bad luck and start seeing a pattern. This is the story of what actually happened to rich women in medieval England, and why the question at the center of Eleanor's life never really went away. Come for the Tower, stay for the part where two different men show up claiming they married her at the same time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Before Henry VIII, if you were sick, old, or starving in England, there was a place you could go. Monasteries ran almshouses, hospitals, free lodging for travelers, even schools for poor kids, all as a normal, unglamorous part of just existing. Then in about a decade, almost all of it was gone. In this episode I dig into the side of the Dissolution of the Monasteries that usually gets skipped over in favor of Henry and Anne Boleyn and the break with Rome, what actually happened to the people who relied on that system, how long it took England to build anything to replace it (spoiler: over sixty years), and why the gap in between is a story worth sitting with. Newsletter sign up link: https://www.englandcast.com/newsletter-sign-up/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mary, Queen of Scots was executed on February 8th, 1587, on the strength of a decoded letter and a forged postscript that Elizabeth's spymaster slipped into her own secret code. But what if that letter never got decoded at all? In this episode I pull that one thread and follow it all the way out. No execution means no closure for Elizabeth, a murkier justification for the Spanish Armada, and a genuinely messier road to the Union of the Crowns in 1603, the moment that eventually gives us the United Kingdom as we know it. One coded letter in a beer barrel, and everything after it tips sideways.This is part of my ongoing What If series, where I take real Tudor history and nudge it just slightly off its actual path to see what breaks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A Devon farmer records buying velvet shoes and 30 gold buttons. A London astrologer hides his affairs in Latin. Shakespeare puts a soliloquy on stage and an audience recognizes something true about themselves. Something was happening in late Tudor England, and it changed how human beings understood their inner lives forever. In this video we trace the invention of the personal diary, from medieval spiritual confession to the first people who just wrote things down because their life felt worth recording. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Did you know the very first person ever imprisoned in the Tower of London also became the first person to escape from it? He got his guards drunk, abseiled out of a window on a rope smuggled in via a wine barrel, realized the rope was twenty feet too short, dropped anyway, and sailed to Normandy with his elderly mother. And the Constable responsible for him lost the job's hereditary rights immediately. This is the story of the people who ran the Tower of London for nearly a thousand years, from that first catastrophic escape all the way to the Duke of Wellington draining the moat and fuming about tourists. It is a wild ride. Tower Menagerie episode: https://youtu.be/cG1E0LkhzkgNewsletter signup: https://www.englandcast.com/newsletter-sign-up/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1525, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V broke off his engagement to the young Mary Tudor, daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, and married his cousin Isabella of Portugal instead. The reason? Isabella came with a dowry of 900,000 ducats, and Charles needed the money more than he needed the alliance. That one financial decision may have changed everything. In this alternate history, we ask: what if Charles had waited and married Mary? What happens to the English Reformation? To Catherine of Aragon? To Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth I, Shakespeare, and the Spanish Armada? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

**Note - I gave Cattalena's death date wrong - it's 1625 and I said 1525! So sorry!!! *** When I picture Tudor England, I used to picture... white people. Portraits. Ruffs. Henry VIII being grumpy. And then I read Miranda Kaufmann's book Black Tudors. Because it turns out there were around 200 free Africans living in England during the Tudor period (probably more, but that's what we know for sure). Working, raising families, going to church, getting buried with full rites. And we almost completely forgot about them. In this episode we're looking at the stories of John Blanke, Jacques Francis, Reasonable Blackman, and Cattelena of Almondsbury. And then I want to talk about something that I've been thinking about: scientific racism, the Enlightenment, Darwin, eugenics, and the strange human pattern of taking progress and using it to build a hierarchy. Miranda Kaufmann's Black Tudors: https://www.amazon.com/Black-Tudors-Miranda-Kaufmann-audiobook/dp/B076ZS1K75/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What if one man had never existed? William Tyndale was a scholar, a fugitive, and a martyr who died in 1536 strangled at the stake for committing what his government considered a capital crime: translating the Bible into English. But in doing it, he accidentally invented a huge chunk of the English language. "The powers that be." "Let there be light." "The salt of the earth." "Eat, drink, and be merry." All Tyndale. The King James Bible is 90% his words. Shakespeare grew up reading him. And Christopher Hitchens, one of the most famous atheists of the 20th century, called the Tyndale/King James synthesis timeless. This episode covers the history of the Bible in English before Tyndale, what he actually did and why it was so dangerous, the words and phrases he gave us that we still use today, and the What If: what would English, Shakespeare, the Reformation, and our whole cultural inheritance look like if he had never done it? Also, the comparison of the Beatitudes comes directly from the book Medieval Horizons by Ian Mortimer where he spoke about the comparison and showed how well they lined up. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Did the Tudors steal the throne? Did they brush their teeth? Did they smell? I typed "did the Tudors" into Google and answered every single autocomplete suggestion with actual history. Some answers are surprising, some are horrifying, and at least one involves people deliberately blackening their teeth to look rich. Tudor history is wild and I love it here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Someone asked me this from their pool. They were floating around listening to the podcast and thought, "did the people I'm obsessed with ever do this?" And it sent me down a rabbit hole, because the answer is so much more complicated and class-loaded than I expected. In this episode we cover: Why Tudors avoided hot baths (and why that was actually logical given what they believed about disease) Who could swim in Tudor England, and it's the opposite of what you'd expect The first swimming manual ever published in England, written by a Cambridge academic who was simultaneously being expelled for blowing a horn around the college grounds The Thames, which was exactly as bad as you're imaginingThe superstition sailors swore by to protect themselves from drowning, and why it made complete sense Tudor history isn't about dirty people who didn't know any better. It's about people with a completely different framework for understanding the world. Water was essential, deadly, and magical to them all at once. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What did it actually take to keep Tudor England clean? Before dawn, before the court woke up, before Henry VIII put on his famous doublet, someone was already up to her elbows in lye, urine, and other people's laundry. That someone was the Tudor laundress, and her story is one I have been wanting to tell for a long time. In this episode we follow three very different women doing the same essential work: the royal laundress at Hampton Court, who washed the king's most intimate linen and had to pretend she knew absolutely nothing about what those sheets revealed; the household laundress in a noble family, including the remarkable story of Bess Holland, who went from washer in the nursery to mistress of the Duke of Norfolk; and the independent washerwoman working on her own, building a business in a world that viewed her very existence with suspicion. Plus: the Tudor hygiene experiment that will completely change how you think about cleanliness, the Flemish refugee who arrived in London and built an empire out of a bucket of starch, and why the most fashionable accessory in Elizabethan England was basically a laundress's worst nightmare. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Everything we think we know about women and power in the medieval world is missing a few key details. Like the fact that there were exactly two female sheriffs in medieval England, and that their lives were directly tangled together in the most dramatic way possible. Nicholaa de la Haye held Lincoln Castle through multiple sieges, was appointed Sheriff of Lincolnshire by King John in one of his final acts, and helped turn the tide of a French invasion in 1217, all while in her sixties. A French chronicler called her "a very cunning, bad-hearted and vigorous old woman." She won anyway. Ela of Salisbury inherited one of the greatest titles in England at age nine, used a clause from Magna Carta to refuse remarriage, paid the king to serve as Sheriff of Wiltshire, showed up at the exchequer in person to do the job, and eventually founded Lacock Abbey before becoming its Abbess. Oh, and their husbands knew each other. Ela's husband is literally the man who tried to steal Nicholaa's castle. The history of women doing so-called men's work is not a modern story. It's just a story we haven't been told loudly enough. Katherine Fenkyll episode I linked to at the end: https://youtu.be/QggqaYpPbe4 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What if Thomas More had just signed the Oath of Supremacy? He could have. Plenty of people did. Cranmer signed it. Cromwell signed it. So why didn't More, and what would have changed if he had? In this week's What If Thought Experiment, we're looking at one of the Tudor period's most interesting counterfactuals. Henry VIII didn't need More's signature legally, he wanted it because More was the gold standard of European humanist credibility. Getting More to sign meant something. And More refused to give him that. We talk about what a living More might have meant for the trajectory of the English Reformation, whether Mary I's reign might have looked different without the brutal martyrdoms of the 1530s setting the tone, and the woman at the center of it all: Margaret Roper, who bribed a guard, lied to the King's Council, and was buried holding her father's pickled head nine years later. I have complicated feelings about Thomas More. Come have them with me.

Before it was an insult, "spinster" was a job title. It meant a woman who spins thread. It appeared in tax rolls, court records, and legal documents. It was an occupation. And then the economy collapsed, the guilds shut women out, and the word became something else entirely. In this episode we're looking at the women who quite literally kept Tudor England running -- the spinners, weavers, and dyers whose labor underpinned the most important industry in the country. We're talking about the guild system that excluded them from legal protections while depending entirely on their work, the enclosure crisis that pulled the floor out from under their livelihoods, and the Statute of Artificers that gave magistrates the power to imprison women who weren't working hard enough. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You think office politics are bad? Imagine your entire career depending on whether the queen liked how you handed her a towel.Lady in waiting sounds like a decorative job. It wasn't. The women of the Tudor privy chamber controlled physical access to the most powerful person in England, and in Tudor political life, controlling the door meant controlling everything. A quiet word at the right moment, a letter passed along or strategically delayed, an introduction made or withheld. These women were intelligence assets, political operators, and the invisible machinery behind some of the biggest decisions of the era. Today we're going inside the system: the org chart nobody wrote down but everyone understood, the dramatic power shift that happened when the privy chamber went from Henry VIII's court to the queens regnant, and what happened to the women who got it spectacularly wrong. Including Lady Katherine Grey, who secretly married a man with no royal permission and triggered a political crisis that landed multiple people in the Tower. And Lettice Knollys, who married Elizabeth I's favorite and was reportedly told there was but one sun in the sky and one queen in England. And then there's Blanche Parry, who had been with Elizabeth since she rocked her cradle, and who figured out the only blueprint that actually worked: be so indispensable that removing you was unthinkable.If you want to go deeper, pick up Nicola Clark's The Waiting Game, which is linked below. It's fantastic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The moment a Tudor woman got married, she legally ceased to exist. No property, no contracts, no rights - her entire legal identity absorbed into her husband's. But the moment he died? She got it all back. And some of these women knew exactly what that meant. In this episode we're looking at three Tudor women who used widowhood as a strategy... whether they meant to or not. Bess of Hardwick turned four marriages into one of the greatest fortunes in England. Catherine Willoughby turned down a king to marry her servant. And Mary Howard just looked at every remarriage proposal and said no, flatly, repeatedly, forever. Lady in Waiting episode I referenced: ⁠https://youtu.be/W8BgrU76hwc⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In early June in Tudor England, one woman was already up before sunrise. She had roughly four months to produce everything her household needed to survive the next twelve months. Medicine. Preserves. Cosmetics. Cleaning products. The entire household pharmacy. All of it, from scratch, while the plants were available. She had no name in the history books. But without her, the household didn't make it through winter. We follow a Tudor stillroom mistress through a day at the start of summer, from the early morning herb harvest before the dew burns off, through the hours of distilling rose water and filling the medicine chest, all the way to the evening ledger by candlelight. Along the way we get into the dissolution of the monasteries and why it made her job dramatically higher stakes, the cosmetics she was producing that were slowly poisoning the people she was trying to care for. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1293, King Edward I finally got what he wanted: the Isle of Wight. He'd been trying to take it for decades. He had to wait until its owner, Isabella de Fortibus, was on her deathbed to get it. And even then, she made him pay for it. Isabella de Fortibus was a 13th century countess who became one of the wealthiest people in England after a series of family tragedies left her controlling Devon, the Aumale estates in Yorkshire, and the strategically crucial Isle of Wight. Two kings, Henry III and Edward I, spent years trying to force her to remarry and hand over her lands. She said no. Repeatedly. Legally. One suitor actually tried to abduct her, and she bribed a prior and fled to Wales to escape him. She also owned her own personal copy of the statutes of the realm. In the 13th century. A laywoman. And she used it to win dozens of legal battles protecting what was hers. I found Isabella in Medieval Horizons by Ian Mortimer -highly recommend it if you love this kind of deep dive into the medieval world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's Memorial Day, and I've been thinking about patriotism -- where it comes from, why people feel it so strongly, and whether Tudor people felt anything like it at all. The answer is more interesting than I expected. In 1485, when Henry VII takes the throne after the Battle of Bosworth Field, England is basically a collection of feudal relationships. Loyalty runs to your lord, your family, your region -- not to some abstract idea of "England." There's no standing army, no national church, no real sense of a shared national identity. And then the Reformation happens. And everything changes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

London, summer 1563. The city sounds wrong. The market stalls have gaps. And then you notice the door across the street — a blue cross painted on it, and a man standing outside who wasn't there yesterday. The plague is back. Today we're going street level into the Tudor plague years. What it actually felt like to live in London when the epidemics hit, what ordinary people did to survive, and three specific summers — 1563, 1593, and 1603 — that each killed somewhere between one in eight and one in three Londoners. We also get into what the Tudor government actually did about it (more sophisticated than you'd think), the plague doctors and their beaked masks, the quacks selling dried toads and unicorn horn, and the parish searchers — older women whose job was to examine bodies and determine cause of death, and who are almost entirely invisible in the historical record. Oh, and Elizabeth I had a gallows erected at Windsor to hang anyone who followed her from London. Very her. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Someone in the comments asked me to do a deep dive on whether Elizabeth I actually gave the order for Mary Queen of Scots' execution. And the closer I looked, the stranger it got. Here's the surface version. Mary was Elizabeth's prisoner for nineteen years. Elizabeth kept refusing to sign the death warrant. Then one day she signed it. Then said she didn't mean it. Then threw her secretary William Davison in the Tower for sending it. And Mary lost her head anyway. The real version involves a beer barrel, a forged postscript, a council that may or may not have acted behind the queen's back, and a secretary who somehow kept his salary the entire time he was imprisoned for treason. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today is May 19th. On this day in 1536, Anne Boleyn was executed on Tower Green. And in a royal nursery somewhere in Hertfordshire, a two-year-old girl had no idea her mother had just been beheaded on her father's orders.That little girl grew up to be Elizabeth I. And she never - not once in more than four decades on the throne - spoke publicly about her mother. We're looking at what happened to Elizabeth in the immediate aftermath of Anne's execution, how she grew up in the strange in-between space of illegitimacy and royal favour, and how Anne's fingerprints are all over Elizabeth's reign - the religion, the image-making, the famous refusal to marry - even though Elizabeth never said her name out loud. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Edward VI gets overlooked. He's usually just the boy between Henry and the interesting women. But here's what people miss: Edward didn't just die and leave a mess. He made choices. Theologically driven, politically sophisticated choices. From his deathbed. At fifteen. This week's What If looks at the Devise for Succession, the document Edward drafted in his own hand that bypassed both his sisters and put Lady Jane Grey directly in line for the throne. We look at the pressure campaign he ran on his terrified council, and then ask: what if he'd backed down? Spoiler: the cruel irony is that his plan failed completely and the thing he was trying to protect probably survived because of that failure. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Henry VIII wasn't content to just be King of England. He needed you to know he was descended from Constantine the Great, the Roman emperor who legalized Christianity and changed the course of Western history. And he had receipts. Made-up receipts, courtesy of a 12th century Welsh cleric named Geoffrey of Monmouth, but receipts nonetheless. In this minicast, we look at where this claim came from, why it mattered so much in the 1530s specifically, and why Henry wasn't even close to the only king playing this game. Turns out "I'm descended from a really impressive historical figure" was basically a whole genre of medieval and Tudor political propaganda, and once you see it, you can't unsee it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1509, England went from a dying paranoid king to a golden coronation to a deadly plague in about eight months. This is a Year in the Life episode, where we slow down and live inside 1509, not just at court but in the guild halls and households of ordinary Londoners who had nowhere to run when the sweating sickness arrived while Henry VIII fled to Windsor. Thomas More wrote some of the most joyful poetry of his life about a king who would later execute him. A Cornish servant woman rode through London on a blue velvet saddle. And a Scottish baby named Arthur was a political provocation in swaddling clothes. This is Henry VIII at seventeen, before everything went wrong. The 2027 Tudor Planner crowdfunder preorder link is here: https://tudorfair.com/products/2027-tudor-planner-crowdfunder Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1591, a Cambridge-educated writer named Robert Greene published a pamphlet exposing London's professional con artists. He named their roles, described their techniques, and basically wrote the world's first true crime series. The problem is that he was also personally acquainted with most of the criminals he was writing about. Today we're spending 24 hours with a Tudor cony-catcher. A cony is a rabbit. Easy prey. And the operation these people ran was so organized they had job titles, a professional hierarchy, and their own secret language. Every trick they used still works today. The rabbit just changed shape. The Tudor Planner crowdfunder is here! https://tudorfair.com/products/2027-tudor-planner-crowdfunder Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's April 1536 and Thomas Cromwell has gone home sick. Except he's not sick. He's deciding what to do about Anne Boleyn. In this What If episode, we play out three scenarios from that single moment of decision: what Cromwell actually chose and why it signed his own death warrant four years later, what happens if he removes Anne without killing her and she becomes a Protestant cause célèbre in exile, and what happens if he does nothing and bets on her survival. None of the roads end well. But they end very differently. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1499, Henry VII had two men in the Tower of London. One claimed to be his wife's long-lost brother. The other was an innocent young man who had been locked up since he was ten years old. And the King and Queen of Spain wouldn't send Catherine of Aragon to England until both of them were dead. This is History as an Empathy Machine, a new thought experiment where we lay out the real options historical figures had and ask: knowing only what they knew, what would YOU have done? Today: Henry VII, Perkin Warbeck, the Earl of Warwick, and Elizabeth of York, who grew up with the man in the Tower and was never allowed to see him again. Tell me in the comments what you would have done. Two questions at the end of the episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What happened in Tudor England when someone's mind turned against them? There was no therapist, no diagnosis, no prescription. But there was a whole system, and it was more coherent than you'd expect. We dig into the four humors as a complete theory of the mind, Timothy Bright's 1586 Treatise of Melancholie (the first English book on mental illness), music as formally prescribed medical treatment, and the social structures that made room for people who thought differently. We also look at Will Somers, Henry VIII's jester, what Bedlam actually was in the Tudor period, and why the Henry VIII personality change story is more complicated than it first appears. The Tudors were trying to make sense of suffering with the tools they had. Some of those tools were wrong. The impulse behind them is completely recognizable. Music of the Spheres episode is here: https://youtu.be/SPlfSROH4TU Will Sommers episode is here: https://youtu.be/Xs8SwqZXPxc It's Mental Health Awareness Month, and people care about you and your health. If this episode touched something personal: Call or text 988 (US) to reach the Crisis Lifeline, available 24/7. You don't have to figure it out alone. Sources: Timothy Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie (1586), free on Internet Archive. Andrew Boorde, The Breviary of Healthe (1552). Peter Andersson, Fool: In Search of Henry VIII's Closest Man (2023). Susana Lipscomb, 1536: The Year That Changed Henry VIII. Historic England's overview of mental illness in the 16th and 17th centuries at historicengland.org.uk. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jane Grey wasn't just a pawn. She was a fierce Protestant intellectual who made a real choice when the crown landed at her feet in 1553. What if she'd said no? We explore what Mary's reign might have looked like without a Protestant figurehead to rally around, whether Wyatt's Rebellion would even have happened, and why the answer has less to do with Jane's courage than you might think. Sign up for the Anne Boleyn Scavenger Hunt here: https://www.englandcast.com/anneboleynscavenger/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Someone left a comment asking about Tudor dairymaids, and I went down a rabbit hole I did not expect. The dairymaid looks like a background character in Tudor history. She is absolutely not. We're covering her daily work, the surprising economic independence the dairy gave women in a world designed to give them none, and why the phrase "as smooth as a milkmaid's skin" is actually encoding centuries of accumulated medical knowledge that eventually gave Edward Jenner the lead for the smallpox vaccine. She woke up before dawn, milked the cows, made the cheese, sold the butter, saved her money, and changed the world in ways no one thought to write her name next to.

You've probably heard that Tudor people never drank water, that ale was the default drink for everyone including children, because the water would kill you. It's in pretty much every Tudor history book from the last thirty years. And it turns out it's a lot more complicated than that. In this episode we dig into where the "nobody drank water" story actually comes from, why the sources historians rely on have a serious bias problem, and what a remarkable piece of recent research from Trinity College Dublin found when they actually reconstructed Tudor beer from 16th century records. And then coffee arrives in England around 1650, and everything changes. Link to the two-sleeps video is here: https://youtu.be/x1Q4tYhLRvA TudorFair.com for the mug! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Before bridges, before coaches, before passable roads, if you needed to get anywhere in Tudor London you needed him. The Thames waterman was licensed, badged, opinionated, and completely indispensable. In this episode we spend 24 hours on the river: shooting London Bridge, ferrying Shakespeare's audience to the South Bank, and watching the coaches arrive and take everything away. Plus: John Taylor, the Water Poet, who was furious about all of it and wrote pamphlets to prove it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Before hospitals, painkillers, or germ theory, the Tudor midwife was the most powerful person in the room. Licensed by the Bishop, sworn to secrecy, she outranked duchesses, performed sacraments no other woman was allowed to touch, and knew every secret in the neighborhood. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Scotland in the 1560s was chaotic even by Tudor standards. In this thought experiment episode, we ask: what if Mary Queen of Scots had fled to France in 1567 instead of marrying Bothwell? We walk through the real history, then imagine how one different decision might have changed the Catholic plots against Elizabeth, the Spanish Armada, and the entire trajectory of the British monarchy. Plus: come join us at TudorCon, October 23-25 in Richmond, Virginia. tudorcon.englandcast.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

History says medieval women were powerless. Some of them knew exactly where the power was and went and got it. In this episode I'm looking at four women who built careers, won lawsuits, and left things behind that still exist today, all inside a legal system that was stacked against them. Katherine Fenkyll ran one of the most active cloth businesses in Tudor London for thirty years, negotiated with guilds and cardinals, and took people to court over bad silk. Rose de Burford chased Edward II for an unpaid debt five times while simultaneously producing embroidered vestments for the Pope. Alice Chester took over her late husband's international shipping operation and donated the first crane to the Port of Bristol. And Joan Bradbury founded a school in Saffron Walden that is still open today. None of them were rebels. They were just very good at finding the gaps. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The story of how a respected Elizabethan botanist looked at a tomato, applied perfectly logical medical reasoning, and concluded that English people shouldn't eat one, and why it took two hundred years for anyone to prove him wrong. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Henry VIII's kitchens at Hampton Court occupied 55 rooms, employed 200 men, and burned six tons of wood every single day. This episode spends 24 hours inside that operation, from the scullions lighting fires before dawn to the leftover food going to the poor at the end of the day. We cover the kitchen hierarchy, the staggering food quantities, the spit boy and his very specific idea of a holiday, who ate what and where, and the theft problem that required a royal decree to address. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Tudor England, a dream wasn't private. It was medical evidence, potential divine communication, and possibly a message from Satan. This video explores the three frameworks Tudor people used to understand their dreams, and the story of Elizabeth Barton, the Holy Maid of Kent, whose visions made her famous across England and then got her executed in 1534. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Tudor royal nursery wasn't a cozy domestic space. It was a department of state, with its own hierarchy, its own politics, and sworn oaths of loyalty just to rock a cradle. This week we're going inside it: the Lady Mistress running the show, the wet nurses who gave up their families and their freedom to feed someone else's baby, the swaddling operation that occasionally involved hanging an infant on a wall, and the extraordinary lengths Henry VIII went to in order to keep his precious son Edward alive. Plus the women who made all of this work, and whom history mostly forgot to name. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the late 1400s, two women were doing something radical: generating knowledge and insisting it counted. Margery Kempe was building an evidence base for her divine visions. Caterina Sforza was annotating her alchemical recipes with "proven and certain." They never met, but they were solving the same problem. One manuscript was found in a ping-pong cupboard in 1934. The other is still missing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What did a Tudor lady in waiting actually do all day? We're spending 24 hours with Anne Basset at Greenwich Palace in 1538, hour by hour from 5am to midnight. Anne served five queens across two decades and survived all of it, which was not guaranteed. We know the details of her life because her mother wrote constantly from Calais asking whether the smocks fit, reminding her to practice her lute instead of gambling, and scheming about how to keep her in the king's good graces. The Lisle Letters are essentially a Tudor-era helicopter parenting archive, and they are extraordinary. In this episode: the sleeping arrangements that would genuinely shock you, the pearl girdle rule that got women turned away at the queen's door, why French fashion was politically dangerous in 1538, what they actually ate and when, the May Day beauty ritual involving hawthorn dew that was completely real, and how Anne managed the very complicated situation of catching Henry VIII's eye at sixteen. She came to court asking for thicker smocks and a little money for her devotions. She left with land grants and a royal wedding Mary I organized personally. One ordinary Tuesday at a time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's April 1st, and I'm not going to trick you. Instead, let's ask a genuine question: did the Tudors even DO April Fools' Day? The answer is no, not really. But what they did instead is so much more interesting. We dig into the murky origins of April Fools' Day (the most popular origin story is probably itself a myth, which is perfect), the Tudor tradition of licensed misrule, and the story of Will Sommers, Henry VIII's court jester, the only person in England allowed to call the king "Harry" to his face and tell him he was being robbed by his own advisors. He also occasionally had to flee the palace for his own safety. It was a complicated job. No tricks. Just Tudor history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices