Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors

11:54

I Stayed in a 700-Year-Old Coaching Inn Where Dickens...

Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the... ·

2026/10/06

This summer I travelled around the south of England staying in historic inns, and stop number three was the White Horse in Dorking, Surrey. There's been a building on this spot since at least 1278, when it belonged to the Knights Hospitaller, and it later became one of the big coaching inns on the road from London to Horsham.We got there way too early to check in, so we played board games at Game N Play (a board game café AND a ukulele shop). Then I fell in love with St Martin's Church, spent far

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28:55

Henry VIII's Playbook for Taking Over the Church

Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the... ·

2026/10/05

Henry VIII didn't dismantle the Church in England. He took it over, one step at a time, and the plan looks an awful lot like a hostile corporate takeover. Squeeze the leadership, take the board, cut off Rome, audit everything, find some dirt, close the small houses first, and then come for the big ones. In this episode I walk through the whole playbook, from the 1531 fine on the clergy to the abbot of Glastonbury being dragged up the Tor in 1539. And I make the case for the people it was run on,

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19:15

Melancholy, Mutton Candles and Banned Bells: How the...

Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the... ·

2026/10/01

By All Saints' Day in Tudor London, the sun was down by quarter past four. In the final episode of our autumn series, we find out how the Tudors got ready for the long dark, in their bodies, in their homes, and in their hearts.We start with the health books. Sir Thomas Elyot warned that autumn was "dangerous to all ages, all natures, and all countries," and Andrew Boorde had a whole diet for melancholy people (no red wine, sorry!). Then we light the mutton-fat candles with Thomas Tusser, find out

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15:25

From Farm Servant to Queen: How Every Tudor Got Ready...

Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the... ·

2026/09/30

Every September, all of Tudor England was on the move. In episode 3 of our autumn series, we climb the social ladder one rung at a time, from a seventeen-year-old farm servant looking for next year's job all the way up to Queen Elizabeth watching sea gods row across a lake that was dug just for her.On the way, we find out why quitting your job without a written testimonial could land you in prison in 1563, wander through Stourbridge Fair (one of the biggest fairs in Europe, right outside

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19:41

Thomas Tusser's Tudor To-Do List for Autumn (Written...

Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the... ·

2026/09/29

The harvest is in. Now what? In episode 2 of our autumn series, we head out into the Tudor village with the best guide I could possibly have found: Thomas Tusser, a former choirboy and court musician who walked away from court, became a Suffolk farmer, and wrote an entire farming manual in rhyme. We crash a harvest home celebration spotted near Windsor by a German traveller in 1598, follow the gleaners into the stubble and the pigs into the woods, and find out why "mast fats up swine, mast kills

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18:15

Why Tudor Tenants Brought Their Landlord a Goose...

Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the... ·

2026/09/28

September 29th was one of the biggest days of the Tudor year, and most of us have never heard of it. Michaelmas, the feast of St Michael and All Angels, was when rent came due, farm servants' contracts ran out, London chose its Lord Mayor, and the lawyers and students all headed back to town. It was also goose day, and the reason tenants turned up at the landlord's door with a goose under their arm is funnier (and a little sadder) than you'd think. This is episode 1 of a four-part series on how the

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21:50

The Peasants' Revolt Was Crushed. So Why Did England...

Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the... ·

2026/09/25

The rebellion is over in three weeks. Wat Tyler is dead, the charters are revoked, John Ball is executed, and by every measure that historians usually use, the Peasants' Revolt failed completely. Except that the tax that started it was never levied again in the same way for a hundred and thirty two years. The next general poll tax in England comes in 1513, under Henry VIII, and even then the government moved carefully. For four generations, the memory of 1381 sat in the room every time Parliament

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20:11

The Day the Rebels Walked Into the Tower of London |...

Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the... ·

2026/09/23

In two weeks in June 1381, English peasants drove a Chief Justice out of Essex, took Rochester Castle, walked into Canterbury Cathedral, camped outside London, burned the richest palace in the country, and then walked into the Tower of London and beheaded the Archbishop of Canterbury. And a fourteen-year-old king rode out to meet them and said yes to everything they asked for. This is Part 3 of my series on the Peasants' Revolt, told day by day, from Brentwood on 30 May to the night of 14 June

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23:23

Where Did All the Women Go? The Tax That Started the...

Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the... ·

2026/09/22

In 1377, England counted about 1,355,000 adults for a new poll tax. In 1381 it counted again and found about 896,000. There was no great plague, no famine and no invasion. So where did a third of the country go?They were at home. Village after village sent in tax lists with far more men than women, because families had simply stopped telling the government their daughters, sisters and widowed mothers existed. In Part 2 of my series on the Peasants' Revolt, I look at the 30 years that pushed

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24:22

How Rain, Dead Cows and the Black Death Started the...

Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the... ·

2026/09/21

In June 1381, rebels broke into John of Gaunt's Savoy Palace, the wealthiest house in England. They smashed the gold plate, crushed the jewels with hammers and threw the silver in the Thames. According to one chronicler, when a man was caught stealing, his own side threw him into the fire.So how do ordinary villagers get to that point? In Part 1 of a four-part series on the Peasants' Revolt, I go back to the beginning. That means the rain of 1315, a famine so bad the king couldn't buy bread, a

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27:13

What the Tudors Did When They Couldn't Control Anything

Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the... ·

2026/09/18

Every year in Tudor England, the weather warmed up and people wondered if this would be a plague year. On top of plague there was the sweating sickness, which could kill you between dinner and supper, plus a flu pandemic and years of failed harvests when bread prices tripled. So how did ordinary people live with that constant hum of "something terrible might happen"?In this episode we go outbreak by outbreak, from the first sweat in 1485 to the plague that greeted James I in 1603, and ask how

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45:31

The Monks Henry VIII Left Behind, Told in 200 Sonnets

Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the... ·

2026/09/16

What happens to your whole world when the king decides your faith is wrong? Richard Smith's new book, Beyond Where Words Can Go, follows two young Benedictine monks, a lord's youngest son and a foundling left on the monastery doorstep, through Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries and all the back and forth of the English Reformation. And it's told entirely in sonnets. Two hundred of them!Richard is a clinical psychologist in Washington, DC who started writing sonnets for his dog (yes,

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11:22

They Tried to Demolish Hampton Court. Then the Queen...

Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the... ·

2026/09/14

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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11:40

Where Were You on 9/11? Walsingham in Paris, 1572

Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the... ·

2026/09/11

Twenty-five years ago today, I was at my desk in Soho, emailing my friends about Thanksgiving plans, when one of them told me to open Yahoo because something big was happening in New York. For the anniversary, I wanted to tell you where I was that day. Then I want to take you back to another morning that started out completely normal: Paris, August 1572.The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre began just days after a royal wedding that was supposed to bring peace. Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth's

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35:17

Henry VIII Lost at Cards to Anne Boleyn. It's in His...

Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the... ·

2026/09/11

In 1540, a printer in Venice published a beautiful, enormous book that let you tell your fortune with a deck of cards. The same year Henry VIII married Anne of Cleves, annulled it, and married Catherine Howard on the day Thomas Cromwell was executed. So I went looking for the English version of that book. There isn't one. And working out why turned into a much better episode than the one I set out to make. The Tudors were obsessed with cards. Henry gambled at them constantly, and there's an entry

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24:28

Murder at Crowhurst: A Tudor Cold Case

Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the... ·

2026/09/03

In August 1532 a charcoal burner named Robert Grame was murdered in a wood in Surrey. He worked alone, he carried a checkered board so he could count his money out there among the trees, and half the county seems to have known it.What happened next is why we can still tell this story. The local justice of the peace, Sir John Gaynesford, was an old man who had no obligation to do any of this well, and he did it beautifully. He examined the body, checked for signs of suicide because a widow's

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46:01

There's a Written Recipe for Henry VIII's Perfume

Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the... ·

2026/08/31

There is a written recipe for Henry VIII's perfume. It's in a 1608 book called A Closet for Ladies and Gentlewomen, and it's rosewater, sugar, musk, ambergris, and civet, boiled down softly for an entire day. I had no idea that existed until I sat down with Jen Siems of Immortal Perfumes, who has spent 14 years building fragrances out of archival research.Jen is a self-taught perfumer and a former English teacher, which means she talks about rare book rooms the way most people talk about their

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18:11

The Rebellion That Started Because a Lawyer Paid a Bribe

Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the... ·

2026/08/27

In July 1549, a crowd in Norfolk showed up to tear down Robert Kett's fences. Instead of stopping them, he agreed with them, helped pull down his own hedges, and led them to Norwich. What followed was seven weeks of about 16,000 people running the county from a camp on Mousehold Heath, with a court, a supply system and a signed list of demands. It ended at the Battle of Dussindale on 27 August 1549.This one has been on my list for seventeen years and I somehow never made it. Fixing that

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24:55

What Things Actually Cost in Tudor England

Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the... ·

2026/08/24

Join me for Taste of TudorCon, a free online preview of this year's conference, on August 29th: https://tudorcon.englandcast.com/tasteoftudorcon2026/ A skilled craftsman in early Tudor London earned sixpence for a day's work. I've been staring at that number for ages, because on its own it tells you nothing. Sixpence out of what? Buys what? Compared to whom?So I went digging, and it turns out if you follow that one coin up and down the Tudor social ladder you end up seeing the whole society. The

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20:08

The Tudors Were Obsessed With Troy (But Never...

Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the... ·

2026/08/19

I just watched Nolan's Odyssey and went down a rabbit hole: did the Tudors even know this story? Turns out, not the way you'd think. For most of the dynasty, England's version of the Trojan War came from a completely different, largely invented medieval tradition, one that literally cut the gods out of the story. The real, translated Homer didn't arrive in English until the dynasty was basically over. In this one: two forged "eyewitness" accounts of the Trojan War, the first book ever printed in

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