HistoryExtrahttps://www.historyextra.comHome of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast2025-10-24T13:02:39.000Zhourly12000-01-01T12:00+00:00Plots and Rebellions, with Professor Tracy Bormanhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/plots-and-rebellions-with-professor-tracy-borman/2024-03-25T12:50:47.000ZView Green Video on the source website

Discover more learning from week three of the HistoryExtra Academy Elizabethans course

Did Thomas Seymour sexually abuse the teenage Princess Elizabeth? – reading time 8 mins Sisters at war: Mary I and Elizabeth I – reading time 11 mins Margaret Douglas: The forgotten Tudor princess – reading time 8 mins Mary, Queen of Scots’ tragic life – listening time 33 mins Queens at war: Elizabeth I vs Mary, Queen of Scots – reading time 15 mins Sir Francis Walsingham: spy-master extraordinaire and Elizabeth I's security chief – reading time 11 mins Alternate history: what if the Babington Plot to assassinate Elizabeth I had succeeded? – reading time 5 mins

]]>Elizabethans quiz – week twohttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/elizabethans-quiz-week-two/2024-03-18T13:23:56.000ZView Riddle on the source website

Discover more learning from week two of the HistoryExtra Academy Elizabethans course

Elizabethan daily life, with Professor Tracy Borman – watching time 15 mins What did the Tudors wear? – listening time 36 mins The dark side of Elizabethan England – reading time 9 mins Hold your noses: the smells, sounds and sights of Elizabethan England – reading time 14 mins 10 ways to die in Elizabethan England – reading time 6 mins Tudor childhood: from dodging death to nursery rhymes – listening time 44 mins The missing Tudors: black people in 16th-century England – reading time 5 mins Tudor dining: a guide to food and status in the 16th century – reading time 9 mins

 

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]]>Elizabethan Daily Life, with Professor Tracy Bormanhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/week-two-elizabethan-daily-life-with-professor-tracy-borman/2024-03-18T12:17:11.000ZView Green Video on the source website

Discover more learning from week two of the HistoryExtra Academy Elizabethans course

What did the Tudors wear? – listening time 36 mins The dark side of Elizabethan England – reading time 9 mins Hold your noses: the smells, sounds and sights of Elizabethan England – reading time 14 mins 10 ways to die in Elizabethan England – reading time 6 mins Tudor childhood: from dodging death to nursery rhymes – listening time 44 mins The missing Tudors: black people in 16th-century England – reading time 5 mins Tudor dining: a guide to food and status in the 16th century – reading time 9 mins

]]>History explorer: Catholic resistance to Elizabeth Ihttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/history-explorer-rushton-triangular-lodge-thomas-tresham-francis-catholic-resistance-to-elizabeth-i/2020-12-07T14:15:06.000ZBlink and you’ll miss it. And I nearly did. There’s no grand, sweeping driveway, no vast manicured lawns, no lofty battlements topped with flags proudly fluttering in the wind. Rushton Triangular Lodge is far too modest for all that. It’s a diminutive building nestled, quietly, behind a line of trees in a corner of rural Northamptonshire. Even the English Heritage sign for the lodge is so small as to be almost apologetic. No wonder I almost drove straight past it.

But, as I soon discovered once I’d parked up in the layby opposite, this is a landmark with nothing to be apologetic about. Spend just five minutes exploring Rushton Triangular Lodge and you’ll be in no doubt that you are in the presence of one of Tudor England’s most enigmatic buildings.

At the heart of that enigma sits one man’s devotion to the holy trinity – a devotion that finds expression in the number three. It’s a theme that seemingly informs every inch of the lodge’s design.

The building is an equilateral triangle. It consists of three walls, each of which is 33ft long. There are three floors, each with three windows and three gables. Over the entrance door is the Latin inscription “Tres testimonium dant”, which can mean “The number three bears witness”. Three Latin texts, each 33 letters long, run around the building on each facade. And atop the entire building sits a chimney. It is, of course, triangular.

But the question is, why? What would lead someone to conceive this extraordinary tribute to the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. To answer that question, says Tudor specialist Jessie Childs, we need to peer into the mind of the lodge’s creator, Thomas Tresham (1543–1605).

Who was Thomas Tresham?

“Tresham was a Northamptonshire gentleman, a big man in the county, who was knighted by Elizabeth I in 1575,” says Childs. “But he was also a fiercely devout Catholic, and that would have an enormous impact on his life, and inspire him to commission this remarkable building.”

To be a Catholic in Elizabeth I’s Protestant England was to find yourself in a spiritual vice. Catholics couldn’t hold public office, they couldn’t take up arms for the monarch, and they were fined if they refused to attend Anglican services. They were even banned from observing mass. This made life distinctly uncomfortable for the most discreet of Catholics.

For a loud, proud believer like Tresham – a man who Childs describes as “a spokesman for English Catholics” – it was utterly intolerable. And his refusal to toe the authorities’ line and attend Anglican services saw him incarcerated for 12 years in total.

“Tresham suffered hugely for his faith,” says Childs, “and referred to his life as ‘moth-eaten’. But he remained fiercely defiant and, when he returned home to his Northamptonshire estate after all those years of imprisonment, he was absolutely determined to proclaim his faith in any way he could. The lodge [built just a mile from his seat at Rushton Hall, from 1593–96] was an expression of that faith. In one sense, it was his way of saying, ‘I’m still standing’.”

Examine the lodge more closely, and Tresham’s devotion becomes abundantly evident. The exterior bristles with biblical quotations – on the southeast front are the words “Aperitur terra et germinet salvatorem”, meaning “Let the earth open and bring forth a saviour” – while the chimney is adorned with the emblem of the Lamb of God carrying a cross. Over the entrance door are the numbers “5555”. This last figure has puzzled historians, though many believe that the first two numbers are a cryptogram for ‘Jesus Maria’.

Walking around the lodge’s dark, spartan interior – a series of circular, triangular and cross-shaped apertures allowing in a little light – is a slightly unnerving experience. With its bare hexagonal rooms and narrow staircases, this is certainly not a place that lends itself to human habitation. And nor did it in the 16th century.

“Ostensibly, the building was a warrener’s lodge, used by the keeper of Tresham’s rabbit warrens,” says Childs. “Of course, this was just a front – the lodge’s principal purpose was spiritual. To my mind, Tresham probably used it as a place of devotion, somewhere where he could reflect, meditate, and feel closer to God. You’ve got to remember that anti-Catholic laws forbade Tresham from travelling beyond five miles of his home without a licence. So to spend time in this symbol of his faith – to be able to see it out of the window of Rushton Hall – would, no doubt, have been a great comfort to him.”

Was Elizabeth I a tolerant ruler?

Thomas Tresham may have been among England’s most high-profile Catholics but that didn’t make him a typical one. “It’s estimated that there were about 40,000 practising Catholics in England at the end of Elizabeth’s reign and – in terms of how far they were prepared to defy the authorities – they covered the entire spectrum,” says Childs.

“There were those who, however reluctantly, attended Protestant churches – so-called ‘Church Papists’. There were those who carried out small acts of defiance like reading Catholic texts while in Protestant churches or spitting out the communion wafer and stamping on it – as one woman was accused of doing. Then, at the extreme end of the scale, you had the recusants – the 8,500 or so hardliners who refused to attend Sunday services. Tresham fell into this category, and paid dearly for it.”

No matter how strong their beliefs, Catholics were to feel increasingly isolated as Elizabeth’s reign progressed. Not only did they have to live with the psychological burden of being labelled bad subjects, enemies within, they had to negotiate ever-harsher legislation. By the time Tresham finished the lodge in 1597, the state had deemed all Catholic priests enemy agents – and vowed to execute any they found, not to mention those harbouring them. And the fine for attending Sunday services had increased a hundredfold.

“There’s this image of Elizabeth as a tolerant ruler, one who didn’t want to force her subjects’ consciences,” remarks Childs. “To me, the facts don’t back this up. About 200 Catholics were executed, effectively for their beliefs, during her reign. Some died horrible deaths. Margaret Clitherow of York had a door, loaded with a seven to eight hundredweight, placed on top of her until her ribs were crushed.

“Elizabeth’s reign has more recorded cases of torture than any other in English history. She may not have known about them all, but her name – that beautiful signature – is on some of the warrants.”

Yet, as Childs acknowledges, there was context to the Elizabethan administration’s harsh treatment of religious dissenters, and that came in the form of Pope Pius V’s decision, in 1570, to excommunicate the queen.

In doing so, the head of the Catholic church was, in effect, giving his flock a green light to plot Elizabeth’s downfall. And plot they did. The Throckmorton conspiracy of 1583, engineered by the powerful Guise family of France, and the Babington Plot, which planned to install Mary, Queen of Scots on the English throne (only to end in Mary’s execution) are just two of many attempts to assassinate the queen.

“In this atmosphere, is it any wonder that the queen and her ministers adopted a siege mentality?” asks Childs. “It’s worth pointing out that Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s spymaster, was in Paris during the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572, when thousands of Protestants were slaughtered on the streets of the French capital. To Walsingham, the Catholic threat was personal, visceral and existential – and, to a growing extent, the queen agreed.”

Plots against Elizabeth I

So where does Tresham sit in this jigsaw puzzle? Did he wish the queen removed? For Childs, the evidence suggests that it’s possible. “He was a slippery character, so it’s hard to say for sure, but he certainly believed that Elizabeth was “bastardised” and that Mary, Queen of Scots had the better claim to the throne. And, in 1582, none other than the Spanish ambassador claimed that Tresham was an active plotter.”

If Tresham was indeed a potential plotter, he was to be disappointed – for Elizabeth died in her own bed, of old age, in 1603. Tresham may not have lamented Elizabeth’s demise but, in many ways, the ascension to the throne of King James VI and I of Scotland and England was to prove even more bitter. Tresham harboured hopes of a bright new dawn when James, thought to be more sympathetic to Catholics, was crowned. He was the first man in Northamptonshire to proclaim the new king. But the fines remained in place; the repression continued.

Francis Tresham: like father, like son

Tresham was now an old man. But by the time he lay on this deathbed in September 1605, the continuing repression had radicalised a new generation of Catholic rebels – among them his own son, Francis.

“These young men had seen their fathers broken by decades of persecution,” says Childs. “And now their ambitions of carving out successful lives for themselves were also being crushed by a hostile Protestant state. This made them seriously angry.”

In the autumn of 1605, a small group of them would express that rage in one of the most notorious conspiracies in English history – the gunpowder plot.

The plot was, as everyone knows, discovered at the 11th hour – and, in the fallout, Francis Tresham lost his life. Just like his father, his dream of seeing a Catholic monarch on the English throne would remain unfulfilled.

“By now, it seems that many Catholics had accepted the reality of a Protestant monarch – they just wanted to be able to get on with their lives and to worship freely,” observes Childs. “The irony is that the gunpowder plot, with all the recriminations that followed, made that dream all the more distant.”

Yet, although Thomas Thresham may not have lived to see his dream realised, his acts of religious defiance have left a lasting legacy – not least in the eccentric little building he conceived in the Northamptonshire countryside.

Find out more about Rushton Triangular Lodge at English Heritage

Catholic England: 5 more places to explore

 

Lyveden New Bield, Northamptonshire

Where Tresham expressed his faith

Lyveden is a second great manifestation of Thomas Tresham’s Catholic faith. It’s a tribute to the Passion – and, as such, is built in the shape of a Greek cross. When the sun shines through the parlour window in the morning, it casts the shadow of a crucifix on the opposite wall.

Find out more about Lyveden New Bield at the National Trust

 

Rushton Hall, Northamptonshire

Where Tresham lived

Rushton Hall was the ancestral home of the Tresham family from the 15th century, and Thomas Tresham lived here while having the lodge built just a mile away. It’s a hotel today but a priest hole and a 16th-century oratory that houses a plaster representation of the Passion offer hints at its past.

Find out more about Rushton Hall 

 

Coughton Court, Alcester, Warwickshire

Where you’ll find a priest hole

Catholics went to ever greater lengths to hide priests in their homes – and Cough-ton Court contains a particularly ingenious example of this: a double priest hole. When the Throckmorton family installed it, the idea was that priest hunters would find the first hole and declare it empty, without realising there was another one below it.

Find out more about Coughton Court at the National Trust

 

Harvington Hall, Worcestershire

Where priest holes abound

This Elizabethan manor house is home to seven priest holes, four of them the work of the Jesuit lay brother Nicholas Owen, who was the principal priest-hole builder in the 16th century. One of Harvington’s was so well hidden it wasn’t found until 1894 by a little boy playing in the house.

Find out more about Harvington Hall 

 

Bar Convent, York

Where a convent operated in secret

Catholics continued to be persecuted deep into the 17th century, a fact highlighted by the existence of this, the oldest surviving Roman Catholic convent in England, established in 1686. Because convents were prohibited, Bar Convent operated in secret.

Find out more about Bar Convent

Jessie Childs is a historian specialising in early modern England. Her books include the prize-winning God’s Traitors: Terror and Faith in Catholic England (Vintage, 2015). Spencer Mizen is BBC History Magazine's production editor

This article was first published in the August 2018 edition of BBC History Magazine

]]>Catholics in Elizabethan Englandhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/catholics-in-elizabethan-england/2018-07-26T14:26:06.000ZHistorian Jessie Childs tells the story of Thomas Tresham, a Tudor gentleman who built a remarkable monument to his Catholic faith and risked the anger of the Virgin Queen

]]>Elizabeth I: the great unifierhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/elizabeth-i-queen-great-unifier-enemies-protestant-power/2018-04-16T12:50:20.000ZElizabeth I faced more difficulties as a monarch than any other Tudor. Born the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn on 7 September 1533, Elizabeth’s right to rule as queen of England never went unchallenged. Protestants (notably John Knox) initially claimed female rule was unnatural or monstrous, while Roman Catholics judged Elizabeth I  a bastard since they refused to recognise her father’s marriage to her mother. Unlike her father and brother, whose legitimacy was never questioned, Elizabeth had to confront dynastic challenges at her accession which continued almost until her death.

Another difficulty for Elizabeth was that she inherited a realm ill at ease with itself. The religious persecution under her sister, Mary, had divided communities and traumatised English Protestants and their sympathisers. The economic recession, dreadful harvests, and devastating epidemics of the mid-1550s created uncertainties and shattered the lives of many ordinary people. The humiliating French capture of Calais (England’s last continental possession) in January 1558 punctured confidence in England’s military power and international prestige.

From these problems Elizabeth emerged triumphant. She confounded her Catholic enemies, imposed her will on the political scene, turned England into a strong Protestant state, presided over a glittering court culture, and died in her bed at the age of 69. Her unusual situation as an unmarried queen – the only one in British history – created a mystique around her that has survived to the present. Unsurprisingly, scholarly studies and biographies of the queen come regularly off the press, easily outnumbering those devoted to the other Tudors.

Flexible and moderate

Elizabeth’s dominant place in British history is above all assured by the establishment and defence of the 1559 Protestant settlement – the English Prayer Book and Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion – which remains the basis of the Church of England today. Due to her determination the Church of England remained sufficiently flexible and moderate. Elizabethan parishioners, for example, could take communion standing, sitting or kneeling, depending on the preferences of the community and its minister. Elizabeth would have no truck with those zealous Protestants who attempted to introduce the more austere discipline of Calvinist Geneva into England. In consequence, notwithstanding the strength of Catholic opinion at the outset of her reign, the Protestant form of worship imposed by her Act of Uniformity gained in popularity over time and became embedded in English lay culture. When Puritans tried to outlaw the Prayer Book’s use in 1645, there was extensive passive resistance, and it was speedily restored (with amendments) at the Restoration of Charles II.

Protestantism in England also survived because Elizabeth was successful in seeing off the Catholic threat. At home she prevented or suppressed Catholic rebellion, conspiracy and disobedience without descending into tyranny or intense religious persecution. It is of course true that she signed the death warrant of Mary, Queen of Scots, but her reluctance to do so is legendary. It’s also true that Jesuits, seminary priests and their harbourers were imprisoned or executed under Elizabeth, but these prosecutions mainly occurred in the 1580s when Spain and the pope were thought to be using Catholic priests to destabilise the realm. By the standards of the age – and compared to her father and siblings – Elizabeth was a model of religious tolerance. Thanks to her, English history was not scarred by massacres and the country did not descend into civil war.

Elizabeth’s importance in British history is also a result of the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Memorialised in later paintings and film, the English victory of 1588 saved England from Spanish rule and preserved the Protestant church. Furthermore, as the most notable military success since the battle of Agincourt, it restored confidence in England’s martial reputation and pointed to the future when England would become a major naval power. Henry VIII may be generally viewed as the founder of the English navy, but his navy was for show, whereas Elizabeth’s was for use. Elizabeth’s sailors and ships were also employed in voyages of exploration, thereby beginning the process which would eventually lead to the establishment of the British empire.

Of course Elizabeth’s fame also rests on her virginity. Admittedly, during the reign the fact that she remained single was a source of political anxiety as well as strength. However it had two important positive results. The first is that her heir was to be James VI, who united in his person Scotland and England, a crucially important event in the development of British history. The second is that it transformed the queen into a cultural icon. Her portraits of the 1580s and 90s depict the archetypal Elizabeth: alone, majestic, expressionless, and imperial, her virginity on show through a variety of symbols whether pearls, cherries, a sieve, a crescent moon, or an ermine.

This Virgin Queen is not only immediately recognisable; it has made Elizabeth a source of fascination for centuries. Biographers and psychologists have felt the need to investigate how she could dismiss social and political norms and refuse marriage. The prurient want to know if her courtiers – Leicester, Essex and Hatton – were her lovers. Early (mainly male) biographers and historians sought to explain how her rejection of love and motherhood affected her character. Feminists were attracted to the sight of a woman defying conventions and ruling alone. Everyone wants to know how Elizabeth could rule successfully in a man’s world without a husband. Her sister, Mary, may have marked out a new path as England’s first queen regnant; but Elizabeth broke entirely new ground as an unmarried one.

Susan Doran teaches at Oxford University and is the author of Elizabeth I and Religion 1558–1603 (Routledge, 1993) and Queen Elizabeth I (British Library, 2003)

This article was first published in the August 2011 issue of BBC History Magazine

]]>The perils of piety in Tudor Englandhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-perils-of-piety-in-tudor-england/2015-06-17T20:17:39.000ZThis article was first published in the July 2015 issue of BBC History Magazine

Religious festivals

Death from above

In the later Middle Ages, the calendar was filled with all manner of Christian festivals. On one of these – Palm Sunday – the boys of Chippenham in Wiltshire climbed onto the church roof to throw small cakes to those walking in procession. In 1507, Francis Gore and Nicholas Hulkebere were not sitting on the roof of the south aisle throwing cakes, but down below, scrambling to collect them, where they were killed by two stones dislodged from the battlements.

Towns routinely put on seasonal plays with religious themes, but the special effects used to entertain the audience could be hazardous. In June 1519, an exploding gun killed William Duntyng of Ivychurch in Kent when he was watching a play about St Erasmus.

Later in the century, many festivities died out under pressure from reformers who thought them unseemly. But eight-year-old Thomas Johnson, son of a weaver, found a play to watch with other boys in Gloucester Cathedral churchyard on the evening of 28 June 1592. A labourer climbed up the nearby cross to get a better view, dislodging a stone that hit Thomas fatally on the back of the head.

Private worship

Praying on shifting grounds

Throughout the 16th century, men and women were encouraged to pursue a life of piety, whether traditional – using devotional books or works like The Imitation of Christ – or influenced by the Protestant ideas coming in from Germany and Switzerland. Some used sacred buildings for private prayer. Alexander Qwhip was praying in the parish church at Smeaton in Yorkshire on Holy Saturday 1516 when a large beam from the church roof fell on top of him. Thomas Parkes went to mass in the parish church at Deerhurst in Gloucestershire on Sunday 14 September 1516 and sat on a bench under the belfry to pray, only to be hit by a small beam dislodged by the bell-ringers above.

Others preferred to worship amid the glories of creation. On 22 November 1531 Christopher Conyers of Brotton in the North Riding of Yorkshire sat down at the seaside cliffs to pray with a book in his hand. When it was nearly noon, he got up to go home, but the grass beneath him broke up and he fell about 150ft to his death. At the top of the cliff those who came to look for him found his reading glasses.

The Reformation

Gripped by religious fervour

In the 1530s, England’s lord chancellor Thomas More, a ferocious opponent of the Reformation, reinvigorated the persecution of heresy. The fate of William Wale of Walton in Leicestershire may suggest the dramatic impact this had on some people’s state of mind. On 11 September 1530, having reportedly been insane for a year, he set fire to a cartload of hay and stood in the middle of it, just like a heretic burning at the stake.

William suffered serious burns to his legs and other parts of his body before his servant Jane Moreton, with the help of his neighbours, pulled him away from the fire and took him home. There he told them that Blessed Mary had protected him from the fire and asked them to take him back so that he could show her to them. But when they arrived, he suddenly fell into the ashes. He died, back at home, the following day.

The Dissolution

Felled in the shadow of the monasteries

The most dramatic change enacted in Henry VIII’s Reformation was the dissolution of the religious orders. Hundreds of monasteries and friaries came under crown ownership and had their lands rented out or sold by the king.

The dissolution transformed the built environment, as buildings were converted to other uses, or cannibalised for their materials. But demolition was dangerous work. At the Lichfield Greyfriars in June 1537, Richard Yatte was taking down a stone wall when his feet slipped and he fell backwards and broke his neck. At Stone Priory in Staffordshire in August 1538, Henry Skatergoode was hit on the head by a stone thrown down by the labourers dismantling the bell tower. In 1541 and 1542, walls or chimneys fell on demolition workers at Wymondham Abbey in Norfolk, Wigmore Abbey in Herefordshire, and the Whitefriars at Cambridge and Gloucester.

Yet it wasn’t just members of demolition crews who met their maker in the shadow of former monasteries. In 1554, 12-year-old John Malkyn drowned in the moat of Missenden Abbey in Buckinghamshire chasing a moorhen; and in 1599, 10-year-old John Phipp, minding his father’s sheep at Dallington, fell into the stream lining the lands of the former priory of St Andrew, Northampton.

Bell-ringing

A custom that killed

The Reformation didn’t wipe out all of England’s religious customs. One parish tradition that survived Henry VIII’s reign was the practice of bell-ringing. Before the 1530s, bell-ringing often served to commemorate deceased parishioners. Later it summoned churchgoers to morning or evening prayer, announced the nightly curfew, or marked the anniversary of Elizabeth’s accession (on 17 November) as a token of loyalty to the queen and the nation’s rescue from ‘popery’.

Bell-ringers were killed by falling bits of broken bells, ringing gear and planks from belfries, or even falls from bell-towers. But the biggest problem was swinging ropes. Bell-ringers were caught round the legs, lifted in the air and dropped, often on their heads, in parishes from Cobham and Northfleet in Kent to Llanvihangel Crucorney in Monmouthshire.

Preachers

The crushing effects of bishop-mania

The Tudor monarchs maintained much of the structure of the medieval church even while changing its worship and teachings. Bishops survived not just as regional church leaders but as great landed lords.

Some of the attention that bishops could command is evident from what happened on 8 September 1595 on the downs to the west of Bodmin in Cornwall. Walter Knyght was waiting near St Leonard’s Chapel, in a crowd of 5,000 or more people, for the arrival of Gervase Babington, bishop of Exeter. Babington was a noted preacher, and was undertaking his first tour of Devon and Cornwall. At Barnstaple, in August, so many had flocked in from the countryside for confirmation that he had had to leave town quietly.

At Bodmin, some of those gathered were mounted, and one of the horses grew restless. It suddenly charged and trampled Walter, who died of chest wounds a quarter of an hour later.

Evening prayer

Beware the flying prayer book

Not everyone found the Elizabethan church, with its long sermons, easy to stomach. On Tuesday in Whitsun week 1596, at Orsett in Essex, Thomas Gryffyn, a labourer, disturbed the efforts of John Adams, the curate, to conduct evening prayer. The parish constable, the churchwarden and other parishioners tried to put him in the stocks, but he resisted so violently that he ended up with internal injuries that led to his death the next day.

Even obedient members of the congregation could find themselves in mortal danger. At Rolvenden in Kent on 24 April 1598, a volume of the works of the Swiss theologian Heinrich Bullinger fell from the pulpit – while William Reade, the vicar, was preaching – and hit the butcher Henry Siesly on the side of the head. Doctors pronounced that the wound was not life-threatening, but Siesly died on 20 May. Bullinger’s Fiftie Godlie and Learned Sermons, published three times in London between 1577 and 1587, measured about 12x9 inches and contained nearly 400 pages a volume. Falling from a high pulpit and perhaps bound with metal clasps, it was evidently dangerous.

Divine providence

God’s will or man’s negligence?

Attitudes to accidental death are hard to reconstruct from the dry formulations of Tudor coroners’ reports, but occasionally they peep through. The pervasive power of divine providence was a recurrent theme in Reformation preaching, and jurors invoked it in an inquest at Snodland in Kent in June 1592.

On the evening of the 21st, Emmeline Tixsall, servant of the village miller, John Dittye, was walking to her master’s house carrying his baby daughter in her arms. She crossed a footbridge by the mill on the river Medway, but stumbled at the far end and plunged into the water that turned the water mill. She fell, the jurors said, “by misfortune, that is, divine providence”, a phrasing they probably adopted because of one remarkable circumstance: she managed to throw the child onto the grassy bank of the pond, saving her while she herself drowned.

Intriguingly, the jurors or the coroner married their references to God’s will with a more pragmatic attitude to risk. The villagers were to be bound over in the sum of £2 to repair the path to make it safe for the queen’s subjects, and to check that it remain safe in future.

Steven Gunn of Merton College, Oxford and Tomasz Gromelski of Wolfson College, Oxford are working on a project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council on accidental death and everyday life in 16th-century England. For more information, go to tudoraccidents.modhist.ox.ac.uk

(Illustration: Becca Thorne for BBC History Magazine)

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