HistoryExtrahttps://www.historyextra.comHome of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast2026-07-19T15:31:04.000Zhourly12000-01-01T12:00+00:00Why did Henry VIII boil his cook alive? 17 grisly tales from Tudor Englandhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/why-did-henry-viii-boil-his-cook-alive-17-grisly-tales-from-tudor-england/2026-07-19T15:30:47.000ZWe’ve all heard about Elizabeth I being the Virgin Queen and Henry VIII having a penchant for wife-swapping, but did you know Henry boiled a cook alive? Or that Elizabeth was rumoured to be a man? Mary, Queen of Scots has had many a film made about her, but none show how grisly her execution really was, or how Catherine of Aragon wanted to send her husband the body of a king to show off her prowess. These lesser-known stories are among the most intriguing about the fabulously dramatic, rather dark and utterly unhinged Tudor dynasty.
1. Did Henry VII marry a witch?
Richard III accused Elizabeth Woodville and her mother Jacquetta of casting a spell on King Edward IV, ensuring Edward would fall in love with Elizabeth and make her his queen. Jacquetta had once stood trial for witchcraft and Richard used this as the basis for his accusations. There was nothing more damaging for a woman’s reputation than that of witchcraft; it was a good excuse to blight a powerful woman. It also meant that Elizabeth’s children were ‘made’ with magic. So, perhaps Henry VII’s wife Elizabeth of York was actually a witch…
2. The groom of the stool
Wiping the royal bottom doesn’t seem like a particularly great job, but in the Tudor world it was an incredible honour. The Groom of the Stool would be with the monarch in their most intimate and vulnerable moments, privy to all sorts of conversations. Especially for someone like Henry VIII, who had notoriously difficult bowels; a trip to the loo could take hours! The groom would then report back to the king’s doctors on anything suspicious lurking in the royal chamber pot.
Such a high-ranking role didn’t protect you from the king’s wrath, though; Henry had one of his grooms executed during his disposal of his second wife, Anne Boleyn, when the man was accused of committing adultery with her.
3. Monkey business
Henry VII kept a monkey as his pet, much to the court’s chagrin as the creature was particularly troublesome, causing havoc wherever he went. The king was a thorough record-keeper, not only of his finances but also of his court; making notes of who said what, where and why. One day, Henry left his notebook unattended, and the monkey decided the time was ripe to dramatically rip the book to shreds. Therefore, Henry found himself with a rather irritating gap in his meticulous court notetaking.
4. Henry VIII boiled a cook
In 1531, a cook named Richard Roose was given powder by a stranger to pop in the food being served at a banquet. Roose claimed he thought it was a laxative and wanted to ‘play a prank’ on his master. Turns out, the powder was deadly, killing two attendees. Roose was then accused of poisoning, being tortured in various grim ways to reveal why he did it. Henry VIII had a great fear of poisoning and meted out a brutal end for Roose – boiling him alive. At the execution site at Smithfield he was lowered into a vast cauldron, being dipped in and out via heavy chains until he eventually died in agony.
5. Exploding, oozing coffins
Henry VIII’s body was more than a bit of a mess when he died; the smell of his pustulating leg when he was alive was almost too much to take, so when he died the rotting smell was very intense. His body had been prepped and wrapped in cerecloth, then placed into a lead-lined coffin.
While stopped at Syon Abbey during the journey to his burial site at Windsor, it was claimed that there was an enormous crack to be heard, and his coffin split, leaking out goo for the dogs to lap up. Many years later, his daughter Elizabeth I’s coffin also cracked and split, likely due to gasses building up in the cadaver.
6. The Tower's bloodiest death
Lady Margaret Pole was 67 when Henry VIII ordered her death. The regular executioner was away so Margaret had an apprentice for her end, who was unfortunately inexperienced in noble decapitations. Laying her head on the block, he missed her neck completely and hacked into her shoulders. When he managed to pull out the axe, he panicked and swung again, only to hit the back of her head. This went on and on, until finally Margaret’s head was removed at last. It’s said to be one of the bloodiest deaths the Tower of London has ever seen.
7. The King's mutilated body
In 1513, the King of Scotland, James IV, invaded England while Catherine of Aragon was acting as regent, and he was killed by English forces at the Battle of Flodden. To show off this great achievement, Catherine wanted to send her husband the mutilated body of the Scottish king, but Henry’s council blanched at the gruesomeness of the request and only allowed her to send the blood-stained cloak instead!
8. Humiliated in death
Katherine Parr had been happily ensconced in a tomb at Sudeley Castle for many years, albeit the chapel she was buried in slowly falling to ruin. Curious locals, however, wanted to find Henry VIII’s last wife and so dug her up. Opening her coffin, it revealed Katherine was still fresh and appeared perfectly preserved.
Over the years, she was intermittently reburied and dug up by the morbidly curious, with people taking souvenirs from her remains. It was then decided to bury her properly, but the team of men hired for the job got drunk instead, and pulled Katherine’s remains out from the coffin altogether. They mutilated her corpse by stabbing her, playing football with her head and ripped out the last of her hair and teeth. Thankfully, she was fully reburied after this horrific incident, remaining there, in peace, to this day.
9. Like father, like son
Little King Edward VI was raised to be a mini version of his father, from the rooms he lived in to the clothing he’d wear. He was indulged by everyone, with his happiness being their top priority. His father’s tyrannical nature wasn’t far behind either, with Edward allegedly ripping apart a falcon in a royal temper tantrum, feather by feather. He then went on to sanction the execution of both his uncles, coldly noting the events in his diary.
10. The boy king's suffering
It might be easier to list what Edward VI didn’t die of, his symptoms are so lengthy and grisly. During his reign he contracted smallpox that weakened his immune system, so he was susceptible to endless coughs, colds and fevers. Toward the end, Edward was coughing up foul-smelling bile, and his legs swelled so badly he had to remain in bed. His hair fell out, as did his nails (after turning black). When even just breathing became an issue he said he was glad to die, to end his terrible suffering. During his autopsy, putrefied ulcers were found on his lungs, leading to a modern diagnosis of tuberculosis.
11. The haunting of the Nine Day Queen
Lady Jane Grey was placed on the throne for nine days and was executed for it by Queen Mary – she was only a teenager. Her sad ghost is said to haunt the Tower of London on the anniversary of her death, wandering the battlements – sometimes with, sometimes without, her head. Her husband Guildford Dudley was executed with her, and his ghost can be heard weeping as he overlooks Tower Green to the chapel where he was buried. If you try and communicate with him, he only sits and stares out of the window, endless in his grief.
12. The scandalous Grey sisters
Jane Grey had two younger, lesser-known sisters, Katherine and Mary. Katherine courted endless drama by secretly marrying Edward Seymour, nephew to Henry VIII’s third queen, Jane. She became pregnant, enraging Elizabeth I, who duly sent her to the Tower. Katherine had a boy (cue more anger from Lizzie), and as both Katherine and Edward were at the Tower at the same time, she managed to get pregnant again, producing another boy.
Elizabeth’s rage was catastrophic – she separated the family, with Katherine dying not long after. Mary, having learnt nothing from her sister’s drama, also married secretly, to the queen’s Sergeant Porter, Thomas Keyes (the man responsible for the palace’s security). Equally incensed, Elizabeth separated them as well, with Mary never seeing her husband again.
13. Mary's phantom pregnancies
The entire court was ready for Queen Mary to have her first child in May, with her confinement starting in April 1555. She even invited her loathed sister Elizabeth to court, to watch herself get displaced in the succession. When no child came in May… or June, or even July, Mary was humiliated. She had all the symptoms of pregnancy, but no child to show for it. This happened again a few years later, with all the same pregnancy signs and Mary again convinced she was with child. It soon became clear she wasn’t pregnant but was likely at this point to be dying. Modern diagnosis offers possible pseudocyesis, dropsy, cysts or tumours.
14. Was Elizabeth I secretly a man?
Supposedly, when Elizabeth was nine years old, she was moved to the village of Bisley to avoid the plague. En route she sadly died, and her governess Kat Ashley had to make a decision – admit Elizabeth had passed away or replace her? For some mad reason Kat decided on the latter, and went into Bisley to find a suitable swap.
No girls matched the dead princess, so she selected a boy instead; he was of Elizabeth’s age and colouring, and the disguise supposedly worked well when he was dressed in Elizabeth’s attire. The king came to visit his daughter one day and didn’t catch the swap. Legend has it that Elizabeth Tudor was buried in the local church, and the Bisley Boy became Gloriana! Utterly untrue, but a great tale none the less.
15. The queen's gruesome teeth
Elizabeth adored sugar all her life and, as a result, her teeth gave her endless trouble, with toothache and abscesses being her constant companions. Once, Elizabeth became so irritable and ill with a particularly bad tooth that the Bishop of London offered to have one of his own removed, to show her how ‘painless’ it was! Elizabeth accepted, watching while the barber-surgeon plucked out a healthy tooth from the Bishop, finally agreeing to let him proceed with her.
Toward the end of her life, Elizabeth’s teeth become black with decay. To flatter their queen, her courtiers rubbed soot on their own teeth to match their monarch. She also lost so many teeth it made her face look quite hollow, so she resorted to stuffing her cheeks with bits of silk to pad them out and make her appear more youthful…though in the process, ambassadors reported she was terribly hard to understand.
16. The naughtiest duo of the Tudor court
Lettice Knollys was a cousin to Elizabeth and managed to enrage her like no woman had ever done before – she secretly married Elizabeth’s long-term favourite, Robert Dudley. Lettice’s disgrace knew no bounds, but Robert wormed his way back into the queen’s favour eventually. Lettice had a daughter Penelope, and in a strange dig at her rival, Elizabeth kept Penelope at court constantly, almost treating her like a surrogate daughter.
Her great favour with the queen became very useful when Penelope, having been wedded to a man she couldn’t stand, conducted quite a public affair with another courtier. Elizabeth usually frowned upon this disruption to the proper order of things, but as she had such a soft spot for Penelope, she let it slide.
17. The grisly death of Mary, Queen of Scots
After 19 years in prison, Mary, Queen of Scots met her end bravely. A scaffold had been erected and the headsman called to service. Blindfolded, she lay her head upon the block and ‘thwack’, down came the axe, not on her neck, but the back of her skull.
The headsman had to wrench it out and tried again; he didn’t quite make it, and had to saw the connective tissue holding Mary’s head to her body. Mary is meant to have cried out during the process, but hopefully she lost consciousness swiftly. When the head was eventually detached and held up to proclaim, ‘God save the Queen!’, it fell with a sickening thud to the floor, and the headsman was left holding Mary’s wig. It was then that the Scottish queen’s little dog came out from between her skirts, where it had been hiding during the ordeal. The little dog had to be washed as he was covered in his owner’s blood.
Elizabeth Goff is author of Bloody, Brilliant Tudors: 100 Tales of Gowns, Gossip and Gory Ends (The History Press, 2026)
]]>Strangers and aliens in Tudor England: what was it like to be an outsider in Henry VIII's realm?https://www.historyextra.com/membership/strangers-and-aliens-in-tudor-england-what-was-it-like-to-be-an-outsider-in-henry-viiis-realm/2026-06-26T14:30:45.000ZCharlotte Vosper: You begin your book with letters from a Flemish hatmaker, and others, to an Ottoman governor’s treasurer. Why are these significant?
Nandini Das: We think we know about Tudor England. We’ve all heard about Henry VIII’s wives, Elizabeth I’s jewels and Shakespeare’s “sceptred isle”. Instead of all that glamour and sensationalism, I start with a Flemish hatmaker complaining about lard.
In 1567, Clais van Werveken wrote home to his wife from Norwich, urging her to come quickly to England. He wanted her to remember to bring with her two wooden butter dishes, because he’d found that, rather distressingly, the English cooked with lard – pigs’ fat – instead of butter. It’s a small detail, but I think it tells us something profound about displacement.
Also at the start of the book, I share letters sent to Assan Aga in Algiers. Assan was once known as Samson Rowlie of Norfolk – now he was the eunuch treasurer to an Ottoman governor.
These letters help shatter the myth that Tudor England was a homogeneous monoculture. They show us that the Tudor world was part of a global web stretching from Norwich to north Africa, populated by individuals who travelled, lived, worked and communicated over long distances: Venetian glassmakers, Dutch seamstresses, English samurai, African servants and Jewish merchants. These historical figures reveal that Tudor England wasn’t an insular prelude to empire. By the 16th century, England was already a node in a global, transcultural network. What evidence of multiculturalism at the Tudor court can we find? The images that typically spring to mind when we think of the court of this period are of Henry VIII in his Tudor power pose, and Elizabeth I standing over a map of the nation in all her finery, reflecting a sense of Tudor England as something monumental, self-contained and complete. But those images are the results of Tudor propaganda.
We have to remember that, during Henry VIII’s reign, the Tudor dynasty was still in its infancy compared with well-established European ruling families such as the Habsburgs. Henry knew that perception mattered, and he wanted to project an image of a stable and powerful Tudor England to surrounding nations.
Interestingly, this image was in part created by non-English artists such as the painter Levina Teerlinc from Bruges, who appears to have been appointed at the Tudor court around 1546. Though we don’t know how many paintings she produced, the fact that she earned more as a court painter than Hans Holbein the Younger did in his day suggests that she must have been prolific. References to her works are scattered throughout parliamentary records and court documents, but she herself is almost invisible. I think that’s what fascinated me about her: she’s a symbol of many other immigrant artists, including German painters and Italian craftsmen, who played crucial roles in creating this image of the Tudors we know so well – yet we can only just about discern their presence from the historical record.
How did English contemporaries view immigrants?
In English historical records, we see immigrants such as Levina described as ‘strangers’ or ‘aliens’. I should make it clear that these terms were not vague insults but technical categories. An alien or stranger was someone from a land beyond the control of the English monarch, who had arrived in England and would pay higher taxes and have certain restrictions on their freedom.
- Read more | Want to live like a Tudor? Historian Ruth Goodman did, and here are five crucial lessons she learned
Quite often, a distinction was made between a stranger who was from another country and someone who might be English but from another tax-paying region. In this sense, you could argue that Shakespeare, who had been born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon, was a foreigner in London. You could also be a denizen – someone who had purchased limited rights. By paying significantly more, you could have an act of parliament naturalise you as a citizen, comparable to anyone who had been born in England.
These categories could mean several things, though. In 1517, a preacher incited a mass riot against immigrants in London, accusing ‘aliens’ and ‘strangers’ of stealing bread from the mouths of children. Meanwhile, in Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors, a man who faced execution as a stranger is revealed to be the twin of one of the citizens of the city in which he had arrived.
This contrast is what I find so very fascinating in early modern England. A stranger could be someone accused of siphoning off state resources, or the scapegoat in a riot – but they could just as easily be the person you married or the friend who brought you broth when you were unwell. The stranger, in fact, could be you, stepping off a ship in a foreign land. The category of ‘stranger’ never settled, instead shifting continuously throughout the early modern period.
How did the Reformation disrupt the image of Englishness that Henry VIII had sought to project?
It changed the very grammar of Englishness. Prior to the Reformation, belonging was largely about loyalty to the monarch and to a given dynasty, but the break with Rome unsettled that framework. Suddenly, allegiance was not simply to a king but to a religious sentiment. Faith became entangled with questions of nationality.
By the end of Henry VIII’s reign, to be English meant increasingly to be Protestant; then, under Mary I, it meant to be Catholic; and under Elizabeth I, it meant to be Protestant again. This oscillation made the boundary between ‘English’ and ‘stranger’ increasingly fraught. What happened if you were an English Catholic living under Protestant rule? Were you as English as your Protestant neighbours?
One of the many people caught in this crossfire was Thomas Stephens. He was a young Catholic when he left England for Rome and joined the Society of Jesus. By 1579, he was a Jesuit missionary in Goa, where he became the first Englishman to write a biblical epic – a retelling of Christian salvation history. Crucially, he wrote it in Marathi and Konkani, languages of western India. Stephens’s life and work capture how unsettled Englishness had become in the wake of the Reformation: shaped not just by where you were born, but by the faith you followed and the worlds you inhabited. His story shows just how far those boundaries could stretch, until being English no longer sat easily in one place or allegiance, pulled as it was between competing loyalties, worlds and ways of seeing.
By the reign of Elizabeth I, could immigrants expect to be assimilated into English society?
In writing this book, I spent a lot of time poring over letters written by displaced families, both English and non-English, containing experiences with which we can identify. These people worried about work. They missed familiar food. They worried about the rumours of deaths, marriages and pregnancies of loved ones who were far away from them. They joined guilds and baptised their children. Assimilation wasn’t automatic, but letters from 16th-century displaced families show us that it was definitely possible.
For instance, one of the people I follow in the book is a Dutch merchant called Jacques de Hem. In the 1580s, he landed in Norwich, which took in huge waves of immigrants – including Protestants fleeing persecution in the Spanish-controlled Low Countries – who supplied skills and jobs needed by the city and its economy. Jacques was one such man, and he became a very notable member of the community. During a harvest crisis in the 1590s, he sourced grain for Norwich from Amsterdam. When growing fears about the threat of a Spanish Armada drove English cities to undertake muster calls of able-bodied men to protect resources, Jacques put his name forward. He went on to buy citizenship for himself and his family, and the names of his children are in Norwich’s registers. Jacques offers us the classic story of the good immigrant: he belonged because he was useful and loyal.
There is, though, another side to this story. Roderigo Lopez was a Portuguese-born Jewish-Christian convert who enjoyed a meteoric rise. He was Elizabethan England’s celebrity doctor, tending to everyone who was worth knowing – including the queen herself. But then the tide turned. One day Roderigo was writing a grumpy letter to his son’s headmaster, the next he was arrested for treason, based on his passing information about the English court to Spain, and an alleged plot to poison the queen; he was executed in 1594. In the blink of an eye, the Lopez family’s fortunes had been reversed. Usefulness had offered him protection and a route to assimilation – until it didn’t.
England and Scotland were unified under James VI & I in 1603. What new questions of allegiance did his reign raise?
When James – a Scot – came to the English throne, the question suddenly wasn’t only about who was English, but about what made you English. Was it that you were born in England? If so, then what about James’s Scottish subjects who had come to England with him and had children there? What happened when an English man had a child abroad? Where did that child’s allegiance lie? These were the debates around right of soil and right of blood. Their resonances carry even today.
One example of this is William Adams, an English sailor who left his wife and children and boarded a Dutch ship bound for Asia in 1598. Having survived the arduous voyage, Adams arrived in Japan in 1600, married a Japanese woman, and became deeply embedded in the foreign political system, acting as an interpreter and negotiator for European companies trying to set up trade relations with Japan. Yet when he wrote a letter back to England, he started by declaring: “I am a Kentish man.” It’s incredibly telling that this man – who now had a new name, a new language, and new family thousands of miles away – still identified himself through his roots in Kent. William’s story shows us how the idea of birthright and national identity became even more complicated during the 17th century, when trade facilitated exchange and connection on an international scale.
How did ideas of nationhood change as the English colonies became more established throughout the 17th century?
Englishness was enforced far more stringently in contested colonial territories as the 17th century progressed. This happened first in Ireland, then across the Atlantic, where negotiations involving language, religion and belonging became even more brutal. We can see this in the story of Elizabeth Key, daughter of an Englishman, Thomas Key, and an enslaved African woman in the colony of Virginia.
In 1656, Elizabeth brought a case in Virginia, claiming that she could not be held as property because by law the court should recognise her paternal Englishness. Her suit rested on the idea that the father was the more important parent when it came to determining a child’s identity, and that, crucially, an English man or woman could not be enslaved. Elizabeth used these arguments to assert that she was a free English woman – and the court agreed.
However, in 1662, soon after Elizabeth had won her freedom, the Virginia General Assembly changed the law. Enslavement became hereditary through the maternal line – so if your mother was enslaved, you were doomed to enslavement, too. This moment of legal change feels hugely poignant because it is a moment at which belonging became racialised. In Virginia, it became easier for some to belong than it was for others, and that ease of belonging depended on your race, your appearance and your background. Stories such as Elizabeth Key’s reveal that colonisation and empire didn’t just expand English identity – they actually transformed it. The concept of a national identity was repeatedly redefined beyond English shores throughout the 17th century, because cases such as Key’s surfaced wherever the English had set foot.
Can we trace any continuities across these stories of negotiating identity and belonging?
What emerges from this history is that English national identity is not a settled inheritance that was later disturbed by mobility. Instead, English identity was clarified by that mobility in the Tudor and Stuart era. Every time a stranger appeared in England or an English person became a stranger abroad, the state had to articulate who counted and who didn’t. That constant redefinition shows us that belonging was never final in the 150 years of history my book covers – it was granted, contested, revoked and renegotiated.
Instability is the common thread in this history. In a way, the stranger, the exile, the denizen, the naturalised citizen and the child born on the wrong side of a boundary all collectively demonstrate a simple key fact: national identity is contingent, and is granted and withdrawn in response to mobility.
The stranger is not just someone who arrives at a nation’s door – it’s also the person who leaves it. So in these stories the stranger is Levina Teerlinc at court or Jacques de Hem in Norwich, but it’s also William Adams writing from Japan and Thomas Stephens settling in Goa. As often as the English were hosts at home, they were strangers abroad themselves. That reciprocity is quite crucial, I think, because it shows us that belonging has never been something that was absolutely owned by some and entirely withheld from others, simply by virtue of birth, religion or language. Belonging has always been worked out through encounter, movement and adaptation.
Do you think that this history speaks to our modern political climate?
I’m cautious about drawing neat parallels because the 16th and 17th centuries are quite explicitly not the 21st. That said, what history can offer is perspective. The early modern period reminds us that national identity has never been static, and that the tension around belonging isn’t new. Political communities repeatedly recalibrate the terms of belonging when faced with mobility and change. There are cycles and pressures – such as economic strain, religious conflict and political uncertainty – that sharpened anxieties about belonging in the early modern period and which continue to do so today. I think we tend to forget that the nation has always been argued over.
How do these stories complicate the well-worn Tudor and Stuart histories centred on monarchs and courtiers?
Those well-known histories are where my fascination with this period started, and I’m still fascinated by those monarchs and courtiers. Those histories matter, but they can also make it look as if the nation were shaped solely from the centre outwards. What my book shows is that England and Englishness were also being forged in workshops, on the streets of towns such as Portsmouth and Southampton, in courtrooms and in parishes, by English and non-English people.
The title of my book comes from Shakespeare’s play Richard II, in which John of Gaunt calls England “this little world”. Quite often, this speech is taken out of context, seen as a wonderful celebration of a ‘Golden England’ in the past. But even in John of Gaunt’s speech, “this little world” is not only already in the past – it’s also a broken ideal. It’s a lament for a very fragile vision of an England that was crumbling rapidly under political pressure and greed.
If my book has an impact, I hope that it will encourage readers to stop seeing national identity as something that is declared from above or the centre, and that they will recognise it as something that is fragile, contested and repeatedly remade through encounter. This book is about the tension between imagining England as an island-bound nation, and discovering that in the Tudor age it was already shaped by the world.
Nandini Das is professor of early modern literature and culture at the University of Oxford. Her previous books include Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire (Bloomsbury, 2023)
This article was first published in the June 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]>Strangers and aliens in Tudor Englandhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/strangers-aliens-tudor-england-podcast/2026-06-17T14:05:32.000ZMany histories of the 16th century tell stories of monarchs and courtiers – but there is, of course, much more to the century than that.
Speaking to Charlotte Vosper, Nandini Das charts the ways in which migration and movement shaped the Tudor and Stuart periods, and traces the lives of the early modern individuals who embarked on new lives in other lands.
]]>The Tudor village that time left behindhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-tudor-village-that-time-left-behind/2026-05-01T15:30:23.000ZLavenham is one of Britain's best-preserved medieval and Tudor villages. Roaming its narrow streets, past crooked timber-framed houses with steep gables, you feel as if you’ve stepped back in time.
Henry III gave this Suffolk settlement a market charter in 1257, stimulating the local economy, and Lavenham soon became a major hub for the wool trade. By the late 15th century, it was one of the richest towns in England, that status reflected in magnificent buildings built by prosperous merchant families. By 1524, it was the 14th-wealthiest place in the kingdom, paying more tax than large cities including Lincoln or York.
The village was famed for its prestigious ‘Lavenham blue’ cloth. This was coloured at the raw wool stage using a natural dye from a plant called woad, then spun into yarn before being woven into fabric. Woollen cloth and raw wool were Britain’s most important exports during the Middle Ages. Continental Europe – especially towns such as Bruges and Ghent – depended on English wool to fuel their textile industries, and Lavenham was a significant contributor.
However, the village’s fortunes declined precipitously during the 16th century. Flemish weavers arrived in nearby Colchester and began to weave cheaper, lighter and more fashionable cloth, with a greater variety of dye colours, using new techniques. Lavenham failed to adapt to these newer methods, or to diversify its industry beyond the wool trade. As that income dwindled, money was no longer available to update village houses in newer styles, and Lavenham essentially became preserved largely as it was five centuries ago.
One building in particular reflects the changing fortunes of the village and wider society: the Guildhall. Five guildhalls are recorded as being built for wealthy cloth and wool merchants from Lavenham over the years, but only one survives to this day. When built in 1530, it was called the Guildhall of Corpus Christi. The religious guilds, which dated back to the 11th century, were originally associated with the monasteries. By the 14th century, though, as well as their role in raising funds for Catholic priests’ duties and celebrating patron saints, the guilds also took on community responsibilities that included repairing roads, and establishing schools and almshouses.
After the Reformation, Protestants ensured that such guilds were abolished through acts of parliament in 1545 and 1547. Luckily, the Guildhall that still stands today in Lavenham was then repurposed for various uses. In later years, it operated as a workhouse to help the poor of the village and others who’d fallen on hard times. Up to 40 people lived and worked there, mostly spinning yarn, and were trained as housemaids or apprentices to help them find jobs.
From 1785, another part of the Guildhall was used as a ‘bridewell’, or jail. One moving story from the records of that time tells of a young girl called Ann Baker. Probably no more than 10 years old when she was apprehended, Ann was whipped and locked in the jail with others who had fallen foul of the often harsh laws of the time. Convicted of larceny, this “incorrigible rogue” was sentenced to seven years’ transportation to the penal colony in New South Wales (now in Australia). She survived the arduous seven-month voyage, arriving in June 1790, but died there at the age of just 29.
Over time, the Guildhall also served as a Methodist chapel, a pub, a grain store and a social meeting place for US soldiers stationed nearby during the Second World War. Today, it’s one of the finest timber-framed buildings in England, managed by the National Trust.
Unsurprisingly, given its exceptionally coherent medieval and Tudor architecture, Lavenham has featured in many film and television productions, perhaps most notably being transformed into the wizarding village of Godric’s Hollow for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1. Lavenham has experienced both great fortune and sad decline – and the Guildhall reflects the many stages in its rich history.
This article was first published in the April 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]>"Let the sky rain potatoes!": the hidden meanings behind Shakespeare's food obsessionhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/let-the-sky-rain-potatoes-the-hidden-meanings-behind-shakespeares-food-obsession/2026-03-25T15:30:41.000Z“There shall be no more cakes and ale”
Puritan hypocrisy
Shakespeare’s works are peppered with countless food references: pies, cakes, capons and a great deal of sherry, for starters. Some are set-dressing details, but many were allusions that would have been obvious to theatregoers of the day – references to dietary theory, political ideas and cultural mores. Food was important to all – something to which everyone could relate, irrespective of social standing or level of literacy.
Take the moment in Act 2, Scene 3 of Twelfth Night when the fun-loving Sir Toby Belch asks Olivia’s Puritan steward, Malvolio: “Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?”
In Shakespeare’s day, the word ‘ale’ referred not only to a drink but also to social gatherings celebrating everything from religious holidays (for example, Whitsun-ales) to weddings – hence the word ‘bridal’, from ‘bride-ale’. In this period, cake was more akin to brioche, and contained expensive ingredients such as sugar, spices and exotic dried fruit – definitely a luxury. Cakes and ale parties were occasional treats for most – and strictly off-limits to Puritans. So, in this scene, Sir Toby is ridiculing Malvolio’s prim and proper attitude, calling him a party pooper.
In his play Bartholomew Fair (1614), Shakespeare’s contemporary Ben Jonson also highlights the hypocrisy of religious zealots. The Puritan pastor Zeal-of-the-land Busy is a former baker of cakes “served to bridals, may-poles, morrices, and such profane feasts and meetings”. Busy is highly critical of displays of gluttony, such as eating a hog roast at the fair, particularly by women. Yet moments before he launches into a diatribe against eating pork in public, he is caught “fast by the teeth in the cold turkey-pie in the cupboard, with a great white loaf on his left hand, and a glass of malmsey on his right”. White bread and malmsey wine were trappings of a well-to-do lifestyle.
As for Malvolio, he throws his righteousness out of the window the minute he comes to believe – falsely – that Olivia is in love with him. He is described as plumping his proverbial feathers like a “turkeycock” and imagining himself wearing velvet, a fabric reserved for nobility.
“Did he marry me to famish me?”
Balancing humours
In the early modern period, the prevailing Galenic theory of health held that a person’s physical well-being was governed by four ‘humours’ in the body: blood, black bile, yellow bile and phlegm. For good health, these humours had to be in balance; if one dominated, it could result in physical or mental issues. For example, people with an excess of black bile were inclined to despondency and introspection, like Jacques in As You Like It.
In The Taming of the Shrew, newly wed Katherina is “Renown’d in Padua for her scolding tongue”. According to the humoural theory of the period, this behaviour would indicate an excess of yellow bile, making her ‘choleric’, or quick to anger.
Such a humoural imbalance might be treated through diet. Foods were also classified by their nature: hot, dry, cold or wet. Essentially, you were what you ate. ‘Choleric’ people such as Katherina were considered to be hot and dry, so foods of a similar nature could potentially exacerbate the imbalance and make these folk even more irritable.
At the beginning of Act IV, Katherina’s husband, Petruchio, orders the removal from the table of some overdone mutton because it “engenders choler, planteth anger”.
Later in the same act, Petruchio’s manservant, Grumio, offers Katherina a series of tempting foods culminating in a dish of beef and mustard – but retracts all of these in turn, deeming them too choleric. Exasperated and hungry, Katherina chases Grumio from the room, shouting: “Go, get thee gone, thou false deluding slave, That feed’st me with the very name of meat.”
By denying Katherina sustenance, Petruchio is hoping to correct her behaviour and rebalance her humours. Clearly, he was not familiar with the concept of being ‘hangry’.
"If you can mock a leek, you can eat a leek"
National pride
In Shakespeare’s day, experts on dietary theory regarded leeks as food for rustics who had strong constitutions – they were unsuitable for more gentrified folk. At best, when cooked in a pottage, leeks had a diuretic effect – good for drawing out phlegm. At worst, eating them could cause toothache, flatulence, headaches and nightmares. So leeks, particularly in their raw state, were best avoided – which may explain why they feature in so few recipes found in early modern cookbooks.
For the Welsh, however, the leek was an emblem of national pride. Leeks were worn in Monmouth caps on Saint David’s Day (1 March) to commemorate the Welsh victory over the Saxons in the sixth century. So in Henry V, the Welsh captain Fluellen is incensed when the ensign Pistol mocks that emblem, and jibes that the Welshman eats his leek with bread and salt, thereby demoting it to a basic food stuff.
In Act 5, Scene 1, Fluellen exacts his revenge by beating Pistol with a raw leek then forcing him to eat it, exclaiming: “Because, look you, you do not love it, nor your affections and your appetites and your digestions does not agree with it, I would desire you to eat it.”
Though this scene undoubtedly has comic undertones, Shakespeare’s audiences would also have been well aware of the potential consequences for Pistol’s health.
“I will rather trust a Fleming with my butter”
Attitudes to immigrants
Food was often used to highlight cultural stereotypes. For example, the Flemish and Dutch were renowned for their love of butter. In Ben Jonson’s play Volpone (c1605/06), Mosca says: “You shall ha’ some will swallow / A melting heir, as glibly, as your Dutch / Will pills of butter, and ne’re purge for’t.” So: dishonest people swindle the naive without remorse – or as blithely as the Dutch eat butter.
Foreign characters were often played for laughs, but some food references reveal deeper prejudices. In Sir Thomas More, attributed to Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle with revisions by others including Shakespeare, xenophobic English merchants decry immigrants for introducing parsnips into the country. The fear is that these “strange roots” grown in manure cause disease: “Trash, trash; they breed sore eyes, and tis enough to infect the city with the palsey.”
That play also expresses a fear that immigrants in London were eating more than their fair share of food, and stealing local people’s livelihoods: “For so it is that aliens and strangers eat the bread from the fatherless children, and take the living from all the artificers and the intercourse from all the merchants, whereby poverty is so much increased.” Such lines reflect attitudes of the day to foreigners in England.
“Let the sky rain potatoes!”
Exotic aphrodisiacs
Modern theatregoers watching The Merry Wives of Windsor may be puzzled by Sir John Falstaff’s line invoking a bombardment of potatoes – particularly in what is supposed to be a scene of seduction or, as Falstaff puts it, “a tempest of provocation”. But in Shakespeare’s day, certain foods were believed to have aphrodisiac properties – among them the exotic potato, along with the eryngo (sea holly) roots also mentioned in this speech.
The tubers invoked in Shakespeare’s play were most likely what was then known as the Spanish variety, or sweet potatoes. At that time, these were viewed as novelty foods and, therefore, luxuries, not staples. They were often preserved with sugar – also considered a lust-inducing ingredient – and aromatics such as rosewater.
One 16th-century cook, Thomas Dawson, included potatoes in his recipe for ‘A Tart That Is a Courage to a Man or Woman’, along with quinces (another aphrodisiac), sugar, spices and cock-sparrow brains. The recipe ends with the instruction: “So let it boyle till it be something bigge”. This probably isn’t a euphemism for anything saucy – but, given the lusty nature of the ingredients, who’s to say what Dawson is really driving at?
Incidentally, during this period parsnips were also believed to promote lustful urges – another strike against the foreigners who introduced that root vegetable, and who were often viewed as being lascivious.
“I cannot abide the smell of hot meat since”
Witty innuendo
While some foods were believed to boost sexual appetites and performance, others were considered to provide protection from associated risks.
For example, unlikely as it seems today, in earlier times stewed prunes were associated with prostitutes and brothels. In the satirical poem The Knave of Harts (1612) by Samuel Rowlands, a “whoring knave” is served with ‘‘Burnt wine, stew’d Prunes, a Puncke [prostitute] to solace him”.
Why the reference to prunes here? One theory is that they were believed to protect against sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis.
Links between prostitution and food don’t end with prunes. Take the following line spoken by Abraham Slender in The Merry Wives of Windsor: “I bruised my shin th’ other day with playing at sword and dagger with a master of fence – three veneys for a dish of stewed prunes – and, by my troth, I cannot abide the smell of hot meat since.”
The first part implies that he is talking about a fencing match – but what on earth do prunes and hot meat have to do with swordplay? The reference to stewed prunes suggests that Slender is in fact talking about an episode in a brothel. In addition, prostitutes were often compared to joints of meat such as mutton – hence the end of his comment. When the Hostess in Henry IV, Part 2 quips: “What’s a joint of mutton or two in a whole Lent?” she’s saying that a dalliance with a prostitute (or two) can do no harm, even for the virtuous.
So the “hot meat” to which Slender refers is a sex worker, and veney is an archaic English word meaning a bout or thrust. Essentially, he is talking about a poor sexual encounter with a prostitute. So why not have Slender say more plainly: “I had a bad experience with a prostitute, and now I’m sworn off all women”?
Given the sexual innuendo prevalent in early modern plays, it seems unlikely that the use of food references to allude to sex was an attempt to avoid censorship – in fact, blasphemy and political comments were more likely to upset the authorities. In any case, the meaning of these phrases was entirely transparent at the time. Rather, food references – in the comedies, particularly – injected added wit into dialogue.
Sam Bilton is a food historian, author and podcaster. Her latest book is Much Ado About Cooking: Delicious Shakespearean Feasts for Every Occasion (OH, 2025)
This article was first published in the March 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]>What was daily life REALLY like in Tudor England?https://www.historyextra.com/membership/tudor-england-2-podcast/2026-03-17T00:00:13.000ZWhat was the most popular pastime of the Tudor age? Why was bathing even once a month considered dangerous? And how could living alongside your pets help save on your heating bill in the 16th century?
In this second episode of our series Tudor England: the big questions, Emily Briffett and Tracy Borman roam the towns and villages of Tudor England, painting a vivid picture of daily life – from fun and games to your chances of surviving the sweating sickness.
Watch the full episode, or listen ad-free at the link below:
View Green Video on the source website ]]>Porpoise for breakfast and late night sex visits: Henry VIII's life in a dayhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/porpoise-for-breakfast-and-late-night-sex-visits-henry-viiis-life-in-a-day/2025-12-05T17:00:37.000ZThe year 1533 was a big one for Henry VIII. It began with his secret marriage to Anne Boleyn, followed a few months later by the annulment of his first marriage to Catherine of Aragon. The new queen was crowned in June, then in September she gave birth to the future Elizabeth I, rather than the hoped-for male heir. And as if that wasn’t enough, the Reformation parliament passed radical religious legislation that would separate the country from Rome and make Henry supreme head of the new Church of England.
Amidst these seismic events, however, Henry’s daily life continued much as it had done during the previous 24 years of his reign. The Tudor court ran according to a strict routine, and nothing – not even the pope in Rome – could disrupt it.
In the early years of his reign, when Henry was at the peak of his youthful vigour, he would rise at the crack of dawn and go hunting for several hours – sometimes until dusk. The courtier and diplomat Richard Pace reported to Cardinal Wolsey that, during the summer, the “King rises daily, except on holy days, at 4 or 5 o’clock and hunts till 9 or 10 at night”. Henry would get up later in the colder months, typically at around eight o’clock.
But those carefree days had diminished by 1533. The king was paying much closer attention to affairs of state and was no longer living “in continuous festival”, as his first wife had put it in the early days of their marriage. Nevertheless, Henry still spent a decent amount of each day indulging in physical pursuits. Now in his early forties, he was almost as full of energy as he had been in his youth.
An “improbably large codpiece”
To get Henry ready for whatever the day held, his privy chamber staff had to rise even earlier than he did. Having cleaned the king’s chambers, the grooms would wake the esquires of the body, who slept in the ‘pallet chamber’ next door to the royal bedchamber. The esquires would enter their royal master’s bedchamber to “array him and dress him in his [under]clothes”, which were strewn with fresh herbs to keep them sweet-smelling.
Having been “loosely dressed” by his esquires, Henry would step into the privy chamber so that his six gentlemen could complete the ceremony of robing with whichever garments he had chosen for that day. Henry loved to show off his physique – as well as his riches – in the quality and quantity of the cloth from which his garments were fashioned. His broad shoulders were emphasised by padded and embroidered sleeves, the curve of his calf muscles was shown off to best effect by white silk hose, and his improbably large codpiece symbolised his masculinity and power. Clearly, he pulled it off. The Venetian ambassador, Sebastiano Guistinian, described Henry as “the best dressed sovereign in the world”.
Hair, ear wax and urine
When the king was dressed for the day, his barber would begin shaving his royal master and dressing his hair. He had to be a man of infinite trustworthiness: after all, he would be holding sharp blades to the king’s throat! During the early years of his reign, Henry was clean-shaven, as Catherine of Aragon preferred. But what she liked mattered less by 1533, when he sported a fine beard, which the barber would ensure was neatly trimmed.
- Read more | The swordplay’s the thing: Henry VIII's Masters of Defence and the thrilling world of 16th-century fencing
Luxury pervaded the business of hairdressing and shaving, as it did every other element of Henry’s daily routine. Inventories of his possessions list silver basins for shaving and facecloths trimmed with black silk, as well as a comb of “gold garnished with… stones and pearl”, a toothpick case of gold, and an “ear pick of silver”. Among the many gifts that the king had showered Anne Boleyn with during their courtship was a gold ear wax scoop. Who says romance is dead?
Next up, Henry would be examined by one of his team of physicians. They came armed with bladder-shaped flasks for inspecting the king’s urine and would also examine his stools. In submitting himself to the frequent attentions of his medics, the king was following royal protocol – after all, a sovereign’s health was of the utmost importance to the state. But Henry had always been prone to hypochondria and would be thrown into a panic at any sign of illness at court. The French ambassador described him as “the most timid person in such matters you could meet”.
Mrs Cornwallis’s sweet treats
Having been washed, groomed, dressed and examined, the king was at last ready to go out into the court. The first meal of the day was generally served at around 10.30 or 11 o’clock, although sometimes it was as late as midday (breakfast was not a thing until the reign of Henry’s daughter Elizabeth). This was known as ‘dinner’ and was substantial enough to maintain the king and his courtiers until late afternoon. It comprised an array of different meats, such as boar, pork, lamb and venison, as well as game birds like pheasant and rabbit, swan and more unusual fare like conger eel and porpoise. The king had a sweet tooth, too, and regularly gorged on custards, fritters, tarts, jelly, cream of almonds and quince marmalade. His favourite confectioner was a woman named Mrs Cornwallis, whom he rewarded with a fine house close to the Tower of London.
In contrast to the popular image of Henry seated at the top table of a great feast, devouring endless chicken legs and throwing the bones over his shoulder, he was a very fastidious eater and preferred to take his meals in private. He didn’t like to linger over his meals, either, because he was impatient to get on with his day.
WATCH | Kate Williams discusses the origins of Henry VIII's vast leisure complex, Hampton Court Palace
View Green Video on the source website
Hunting, archery, bowling and tennis took up several hours. Sir William Kingston, who was a regular at Henry’s court (and was later Anne Boleyn’s gaoler at the Tower), observed that even after more than 20 years on the throne: “The king hawks every day with goshawks and others… both before noon and after.” Having practised these sporting pursuits from childhood, Henry was highly skilled, particularly at tennis. The Venetian ambassador enthused: “It is the prettiest thing in the world to see him play.”
“Tedious and painful”
The distinction between work and play was blurred during Henry’s reign. He would discuss politics with ambassadors and ministers while enjoying a game of bowls or practising archery, and would hold more private audiences with his advisors while being dressed or undressed, taking his meals or bathing.
The privy council was the beating heart of Henry’s government and would meet almost every day at around noon. By 1533, Henry was attending those meetings much more frequently than during the carefree early years of his reign. They would discuss all the most pressing matters of the day – of which there was no shortage in the year that the king rid himself of one wife, took another and separated England from Roman Catholic Europe. Thomas Cromwell was the most influential member of the privy council and worked closely with Henry, often holding private meetings with the king.
Supper was served between three and four o’clock each afternoon and would typically comprise soups, pottage, roasted meats, tarts, custards, fruits, nuts and cheeses. If Henry was peckish in the evening, his cooks would prepare a snack known as a ‘rear night’ or ‘all night’, which was usually served between eight and nine o’clock.
Henry was renowned for his piety and spent a significant part of every day in worship. One ambassador reported: “He hears three masses daily when he hunts and sometimes five on other days.” This had been encouraged by his first wife, a devout Roman Catholic. By contrast, Anne Boleyn was a reformer and introduced Henry to radical religious texts that encouraged him to break from obedience to Rome. Although he admitted to finding writing “tedious and painful”, the king was a voracious reader, and his private library was filled with classical and theological texts from across the world.
Long trips to the loo
Every so often, the king would take a bath in his private apartments. But the leading physicians of the age cautioned against regular bathing in hot water because it opened the pores and allowed deadly diseases such as the plague, sweating sickness and smallpox to enter the body. Instead, cold water was used for washing the king’s hands and face first thing in the morning and before and after every meal. Even if Henry’s baths were infrequent, they were predictably luxurious. At the palaces of Richmond and Whitehall, Henry had steam baths installed, fragments of which are still preserved at Hampton Court.
Henry had his own private close stool (a type of portable toilet) in each palace. His ‘stool chambers’ at Greenwich and Hampton Court were kitted out with pictures and bookshelves to keep the king amused during the long hours that he spent there. His close stools were covered in embroidered velvet, stuffed with swan’s-down and studded with gilt nails.
To emphasise his magnificence, Henry staged lavish evening entertainments at court. His Master of the Revels devised plays, pageants and musical interludes to be performed in front of the king and his guests. Some of the more ambitious set-pieces involved mock battles and the famous ‘Château Vert’ pageant of 1522, when a certain young lady called Anne Boleyn made her first appearance at Henry’s court. As well as being an accomplished musician, Henry loved to show off on the dance floor. He “exercised himself daily in dancing” and “does wonders and leaps like a stag”, reported an astonished onlooker.
Most evenings, the king and his courtiers would indulge in gambling. Huge sums would be won and lost at cards, dice and board games. Between the years 1529 and 1532, Henry squandered a staggering £3,243 (equivalent to £2.36 million today). But there was always a jester or ‘fool’ on hand to cheer the king after his losses. Henry’s favourite fool was Will Somer, who entered his service in 1525 and kept the king entertained for the next 20 years. It was said that “in all the court few men were more beloved than was this fool”.
Henry’s bedroom antics
The king rarely retired before midnight, “which is our accustomed hour at court to go to bed”. An elaborate ceremony of disrobing began as soon as he stepped into the bedchamber. His gentlemen and esquires of the body would carefully untie, unbuckle and remove every item of clothing and then put on his nightgown. Another attendant would bring a basin of water and a cloth so that he could wash his face and clean his teeth. The king’s body servants would then comb his hair and cover it with a ‘night-bonnet’ of scarlet or black embroidered velvet before helping him into bed and lighting a candle next to it. Their work complete, all but one of the privy chamber attendants bowed low and backed out of the room, leaving their royal master to his rest.
Every detail of this protracted routine would be observed each night without fail. It only differed when Henry chose to visit his wife. On such occasions, he would summon his grooms of the chamber, who would dress him in his nightrobe and escort him with lighted torches to the door of the queen’s bedchamber. The king would rarely spend the night there, though, and would return to his own bedchamber once his, erm, ‘business’ there had been concluded.
But given that Anne Boleyn was almost certainly pregnant at the time she married Henry in January 1533, these conjugal visits would have been rare or non-existent until she gave birth in September. The wisdom of the day dictated that sex during pregnancy was harmful to the unborn child, so instead Henry found comfort with other women.
This caused the first serious rift between the newlyweds in August 1533, when Anne was about to enter her ‘confinement’ – the month-long period when a royal wife would live in complete seclusion to await the birth of her child. “The king’s affection for her [Anne] is less than it was”, reported the Imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys. “He now shows himself in love with another lady, and many nobles are assisting him in the affair.” When she heard of this, Anne was “very jealous” and confronted her royal husband. To her dismay, rather than offering placatory assurances, he spat back that she must “shut her eyes and endure” as more “worthy” persons had done. Henry’s affection for his new wife took another nose-dive when she gave birth to a daughter (the future Elizabeth I) on 7 September, rather than the hoped-for son.
Adultery, treason and execution
As the year 1533 drew to a close, the court moved to Greenwich for the Christmas celebrations. “The King’s Grace kept great court, as merry and lusty as ever”, one guest observed. There was a good reason for Henry to be cheerful: Anne Boleyn was pregnant once more. Her New Year gift to the king was an exquisite table fountain of gold, studded with rubies, diamonds and pearls. Designed by Hans Holbein, it featured three naked women standing at the foot of a fountain, water issuing forth from their nipples – a clear allusion to her impending motherhood.
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Sadly, the queen lost the child a few months later and miscarried twice more in the two years that followed. The king, who in the early days of their courtship had been so enraptured that he had overturned his entire kingdom in order to marry Anne, now “shrank from her”. In May 1536, Anne was condemned on trumped-up charges of adultery, incest and treason and executed.
Earlier that year, Henry had suffered a serious accident whilst jousting, which brought the physical activities that had filled so many of his days at court to an abrupt end. Plagued by pain and humiliated by his expanding girth, this most famous of kings became the bloated tyrant of legend.
]]>5 things you (probably) didn't know about the Tudorshttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/5-things-you-probably-didnt-know-about-the-tudors/2025-10-20T08:00:29.000Z1. The Tudors brought peace and prosperity to England
Bringing peace was probably the most important thing the Tudors did for us. The British countryside is littered with the sites of medieval battles – places where opposing forces stomped over crops, burned barns and rounded up people’s sons. For centuries, rival aristocrats made and broke alliances, and killed those who got in their way. Henry Tudor took the throne in exactly this way at Bosworth in 1485, when he persuaded a number of warlords to desert their king, Richard III. But there it stopped. Intrigue and power politics were thenceforth undertaken by more covert means. Everyone became a bit safer, the day-to-day became a bit more predictable, and lots of people got a little bit richer. Less war meant that more crops made it to market, more young men were available for work, and there was less damage done to buildings, less thievery with menaces and safer travel. In turn, this meant more trade and a greater willingness to invest. The peace the Tudors brought to their lands benefited all – rich and poor alike.
2. Henry VIII was a reluctant reformer
When the Tudors came to power, the Catholic church was already struggling to maintain its grip upon the minds and souls of Europe. New ideas about the nature of God and the state of Christianity were circulating. So when Henry VIII lost patience with the pope, there were plenty of people delighted by the opportunity to rethink England’s official religious position.
Henry himself seems to have been happy to leave the religion as was. He just wanted the power and money the pope had been leveraging from his kingdom. He was quickly convinced, though, that he should also have the money and assets of the monasteries. A significant number of influential and vocal people wanted much more, however, pushing for a ‘purer’ form of Christianity that did away with priests entirely and abandoned the rituals and traditions of Catholicism. Others, of course, wholeheartedly defended the time-honoured form of faith.
The result was a fracturing of society. Hundreds, both Protestant and Catholic, were executed for refusing to change their form of faith and follow the state-sponsored format – one that changed radically several times. But for all the death and fear, the upset and soul-searching, a new freedom of thought also emerged.
3. The Tudor era brought a rise in literacy
A few years before Henry Tudor took the throne, in 1476, William Caxton printed his first book on English soil. As printing presses became established and the price of books plummeted, reading became affordable to many more people. There was also more choice. Alongside religious texts, books of popular stories, advice manuals, joke books, medical texts and scandal sheets were published. At the same time, there was a new religious pressure for Britons to learn to read. The Protestant faith required its adherents to stop relying on priests and to read the Bible for themselves. This applied to everyone: shepherds and ploughmen as well as nobles and merchants – even women. Teaching people to read became a new religious duty and literacy rates started to climb.
4. They drove the expansion of industry
The Tudor monarchs – Elizabeth, in particular – were very keen to kickstart new industries and update old ones. In order to do this, specialist workers from Europe were encouraged to resettle on these shores. Some came as refugees fleeing religious persecution in France and the Low Countries, bringing new textile-making skills. Others were purely economic migrants with mining expertise or knowledge of new glassblowing and brass-founding techniques. The strategy worked – and these new arrivals provided the core of know-how and experience around which English industry could grow.
5. The health of the nation improved
Rates of fatal illness fell during the Tudor period – though this was the result of sheer luck, as certain major diseases mutated into less virulent forms. When a new, often lethal form of the plague arrived in England in 1348 – the Black Death – it killed around a third of the population, suddenly and catastrophically. Plague returned to Britain many times over the centuries that followed but, by the start of the Tudor era, the outbreaks were becoming smaller and more people were surviving. Meanwhile, another major killer known as the sweating sickness – a mysterious disease causing rapidly developing symptoms including shivers, headaches, dizziness, pains and, soon afterwards, sweating and commonly death – came and went. The first epidemic broke out in 1485, just as the Tudor era was beginning, and the last came in 1551, after which it apparently vanished completely. With both of these big killers in retreat, the population began to grow.
Ruth Goodman is a social and domestic historian and broadcaster. Her books include How to Be a Tudor (Viking, 2015)
This article was first published in the December 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Want to step even further into the world of the Tudors? In her brand-new HistoryExtra Academy series, Ruth Goodman takes you inside everyday life in the 16th century — from food and fashion to faith, work, and even love and marriage. The first three episodes are available now on the HistoryExtra app, with more to come soon. Start watching today
Want to ask Ruth a question? Join our live virtual Q&A on 19 November. Find out more here
]]>What did the Tudors think was ‘good’ sex? These tips and tricks were key to relationships in the 16th centuryhttps://www.historyextra.com/period/tudor/good-sex-tips-and-tricks-16th-century/2025-10-08T15:53:59.000ZIs there any better way to understand the deadly politics and high drama of the Tudor era than through the lens of their audacious romantic entanglements?
After all, King Henry VIII had six wives, instigating the Reformation in the name of love (and presumably lust, too), meanwhile Queen Elizabeth I grew a cult of personality around her virginity, developing it into a sharp instrument of power and control. Sex, or lack thereof, was clearly important to the Tudor royals.
But away from the courts of kings and queens, what role did intimate romance play in the lives of ordinary Tudors; the people who were farmers, millers, bakers and blacksmiths? What did they get up to in the bedroom, and what was the role of sex in their lives?
Good vs bad sex
“[Sex] was seriously important to people in Tudor Britain,” says Ruth Goodman, speaking in her newest HistoryExtra Academy course, Tudor Life, “it marked the moment of adulthood. A single person [as opposed to someone who was married] wasn’t considered to be fully adult”.
- Watch now | Ruth Goodman on Tudor life
As a watershed moment in a person’s life, sex was incredibly important, both practically and symbolically. However, it wasn’t necessarily straightforward – there were social norms that dictated how people should be having sex.
Sex was only considered ‘good’ if it took place within marriage and, as Goodman explains, “so long as it fulfilled one of two purposes: one was to bond a couple together, and the other was procreation”.
No matter what sort of sex it was, if it happened outside of the marital bed, it was immoral. Anything that fell outside of the “traditional marriage picture of a man and a woman creating babies” was a transgression and ‘bad’ sex.
But that didn’t mean that the Tudors discouraged pleasure.
The importance of pleasure
One of the main Tudor beliefs about sex was that a woman could only conceive if she was enjoying the act, and this would ideally include a female orgasm. “Just as a man needed to be interested in order to produce seed, a woman needed to be interested in order for that union to occur”, explains Goodman.
It may seem surprising that there was such a focus on women’s pleasure in what was a largely patriarchal society. But, while some good husbands may have used this belief to ensure their wives had a good time, there were some more sinister repercussions to this too.
“The bad side of [this belief] is that if a woman is forced [to have sex] and she conceives, then nobody in society believes she was raped; they think she must have been enjoying it,” explains Goodman.
So, while female pleasure was considered to be a crucial part of sex, and essential to procreation, it was a double-edged sword that had inadvertent negative consequences too.
Getting the position right
But pleasure wasn’t the only thing needed for procreation, according to Tudor ideas about sex. There was some biological backing to their understanding of reproduction too.
“It’s thought in the Tudor period that a woman’s reproductive organs are a mirror image of a man’s … if you want to have children, you should [be positioned in] a nice straight line to allow the seed to get where it needs to go”, says Goodman.
- Read more | The Virgin Queen? Elizabeth I's forbidden love
This meant that the ultimate position to optimise conception was the missionary position. The idea was that the straighter the couple’s bodies were lined up, the more likely they were to conceive. “Any [position] in which the bodies were bent, particularly a woman’s body, which might prohibit the movement of the seed [was] not so good,” notes Goodman.
It wasn’t just the position of the couple that mattered, though. The Tudors had detailed notions about how the testicles affected the success of conception and the gender of the baby.
Tudor understandings of the body proposed that the right-hand side of the heart carried fresh, more vigorous blood around the body, so the right side had more energy than the left. It followed that the more ‘powerful’ right testicle would therefore be responsible for creating male children – and the left, female.
As we know from Henry VIII’s succession crisis, having male babies was of great importance. So, what did Tudor men do if they wanted to ensure a male heir?
Well, as Goodman reveals, “if you wanted to be sure of having a boy, it was a really good idea to tie a ribbon around the left-hand testicle, just to ensure that the correct seed made the journey”.
Although we now know that this would not have had any impact on a baby’s sex, it’s intriguing to think that men in the 16th century – including King Henry VIII himself – may have been tying ribbons around their genitals in an attempt to conceive a much-wanted boy.
What did Tudors think was sexy?
While the main reason for sex in the 16th century was to conceive a child, that doesn’t mean people were only having sex to procreate. Many couples were simply in love and just wanted to have fun. To do that, they had to be attracted to each other.
But what was considered sexy in the Tudor period?
According to Ruth, linen was considered a very sexy material because it was the “layer that sits next to the skin, [highlighting] that intimacy between you and your clothes”.
The same principle applied to a woman’s hair. As something that would usually be either covered or pinned back in polite society, a woman unveiling her hair to a man was considered a great honour and an intense act of intimacy.
“A woman’s hair is her crowning glory and her husband’s delight”, says Goodman. “It is a private sexual pleasure, not something to be shown to [just anyone]”.
For Tudor women, they might be drawn to a man’s legs. Those tight stockings that are a familiar image of the Tudor period were a way for men to show off the shape of their “nicely turned calf”.
The Tudors had rules – but they weren’t prudes
With all these rules and expectations, and the notion that hair and calves were sexy, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the Tudors were prudes. In reality, they were quite open about sex.
Tudor society had its deep-rooted beliefs about what sex was for, who could have it and how they should do it, but they weren’t shy about it. As Goodman explains, “The Tudor world was not particularly prissy. There was an awful lot of talk, and quite open talk, about relations between men and women, about attractiveness and sexiness”.
Want to step even further into the world of the Tudors? In her brand-new HistoryExtra Academy series, Ruth Goodman takes you inside everyday life in the 16th century — from food and fashion to faith, work, and even love and marriage. The first three episodes are available now on the HistoryExtra app, with more to come soon. Start watching today
Want to ask Ruth a question? Join our live virtual Q&A on 19 November. Find out more here
]]>From fatal foliage to the perils of ploughing: the Tudor calendar of deathhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/from-fatal-foliage-to-the-perils-of-ploughing-the-tudor-calendar-of-death/2025-07-15T08:00:27.000ZJanuary
Deadly cold and woodland woes
Tudor England languished in the chill grip of a ‘little ice age’, and winters were especially harsh.
Decembers were bad enough: in one 1542 blizzard, eight travellers – seven of them women and girls – died on the roads of Herefordshire and Shropshire. January was worse still.
Snowstorms in January 1541 wreaked havoc across the Midlands. In Nottinghamshire, William Johnson lost his way heading home from Burton Joyce to his house at Shelford, and perished after falling into an unseen tributary of the Trent. In Derbyshire, three members of the Crabtre family died when their house in Kinder was flattened by a “snowe dryft”.
January 1571 claimed victims in East Anglia. Peter Eade, a runaway servant just nine years old, died in snowy Rushford, Norfolk, wandering and hungry. And Robert Kyng, aged 40, fell into a snow-covered “sawyng pytt” in Holton Hall Wood at Stratford St Mary in Suffolk.
Many people had to brave such cruel weather to undertake their work, not least felling leafless trees in a season when dormant wood was less likely to crack when cut.
William Smale paid the ultimate price when tackling an oak in Bagborough Wood, Somerset in 1513. He cut through it with his axe, but it caught on an ash tree as it fell. To free the oak, Smale hacked three or four times at the ash. It shattered and sent sharp fragments flying at his head, piercing his brain. He died three days later.
February
Fatal foliage and football
February brought more trouble with trees, especially for those gathering greenery to top up dwindling winter stocks of fodder for livestock.
In 1565, the keeper of Castle Camps Park in Cambridgeshire sent John Spycer out into the cold to cut leafy branches to feed animals. As Spycer stood on “a smale or slender bowghe”, he fell to his death. In 1505, Thomas Cleygate of Westhumble, Surrey was cutting “mistell bowys” – mistletoe – from a tree to feed sheep when he plunged 9 feet.
At the same time, February offered excitement. It was a popular month for playing football, a game that was then much more violent than the modern sport, more akin to American football but without the padding and helmets. Dangers lurked everywhere: in the opposing team, the pitch, even players’ personal accessories.
Playing at Allerston, Yorkshire in 1523, John Langbern and Roger Bridkirk crashed into one another as they ran after the ball. Roger – clearly a big lad – landed on top of John, fatally crushing him. In 1564, at St Peter’s in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, Walter Brassett was “plaing at the foteball” with neighbours in Edward Bugge’s field when he fell onto a maple tree stump, cut his leg and bled to death in half an hour.
It seems, too, that players didn’t remove knives from their belts before getting stuck in. At Bedale, Yorkshire in 1550, George Robynson tackled George Stapper, who was fatally wounded in the belly by Robynson’s blade.
March
The price of poverty, the cost of crows
As winter ebbed, so did food stocks – and perhaps charitable instincts – meaning that March was a tough month for the poor. One such unfortunate was octogenarian Elizabeth Purseglove, who fell into a ditch in Chilcote, Derbyshire while begging in 1531. Another, William Dungkyne, fell into a pit as he returned home to Cambridge from begging in Barnwell in 1538. No one even knew the name of the vagrant pauper who fell down “the side of the lower clyffe” at Church Hougham, Kent in March 1596.
Work was relatively scarce, too, though there were always tasks to tackle – scaring birds away from growing crops, for example. At Revelstoke, Devon in 1564, Andrew Wylloughby was trying to disperse crows by firing lead pellets from his “handgonne” when it misfired and burned his face; he dropped it, accidentally shooting John Kinkham in the leg.
Older technologies weren’t necessarily safer: in April 1556, Thomas Branches was using his “lether slynge” to drive crows off barley in Patching, Sussex when one stone “sudenlye slypte owte of the slynge backewarde” and felled Richard Sowton with a point-blank blow to the head.
April
Risking it all for birds and blooms
A tempting new source of food appeared in April: recently hatched rook chicks, ready for plucking from their nest and baking in a pie – if you could climb safely up and down a tree, that is. In Warwickshire in 1548, George Gybbes fell 40 feet from an elm at Hunscote. In 1564, Thomas Harmon plummeted 60 feet from an ash at Moxhull. In Suffolk, Robert Beamont came down 50 feet from an elm in the “Rookewood” at Brightwell in 1588.
At Clyst Honiton in Devon in 1518, Benedict Page managed to cling on in his oak tree when a too-slender branch snapped beneath his feet. But he dropped the pointed pole he was carrying onto Richard Kellegh, who died six days later.
Picking flowers should have been less perilous – but children were prone to collecting blooms in risky spots. Four-year-old Margaret Bockyn fell into her father’s garden pond at Rollesby in Norfolk while gathering “pryme roses” on the bank in 1579. Similarly, five-year-old Barbara Fell plunged into a pond just outside Walmgate Bar at York during a flower-picking session the following year.
Eight-year-old Robert Hudsone avoided water while collecting blooms at Stutton near Tadcaster, North Yorkshire in 1562, but wandered too close to a grey horse, which kicked him fatally in the head.
- Read more | The most common accidental way to die in Tudor England reveals surprising truths about daily life
May
When leisure turned lethal
In this prime month for recreation, revellers needed to be wary of the maypoles set up for dancing. Alice Wasse was hit in the head by one that fell in the wind at Mansfield Woodhouse in Nottinghamshire in 1578. Elsewhere, John Richardson was killed while a pole was being erected on Abbey Green, Bath in 1594, and Thomas Wylkes died while one was being taken down at Marsh Baldon in Oxfordshire in 1543, having failed to heed the workmen’s cries of “aware, aware, avoide”.
Clement weather also encouraged more permanent construction. Robert Catley died while working on a barn at Thornton-in-Craven, North Yorkshire in 1539, as did John Hodges toiling on a “wayn house” at Hope under Dinmore, Herefordshire, and James Breythweth and John Wood building a house at Worksop, Nottinghamshire in 1566.
Authorities encouraged men to practise shooting arrows rather than dancing – and May saw more archery accidents than any other month. At Horsley, Gloucestershire in 1504, John Snowe rushed to the target after taking his shot, and was hit by those firing after him. And at Dagenham, Essex in 1591, John Skoggyn was so focused on checking where his arrow had gone that he “dyd not go aside” when John Cartnayle “dyd crye” to warn him that he was about to shoot at the same mark. Skoggyn suffered an arrow in the head.
June
Drowning by numbers
Many people perished in the water in June, when early summer heat drove working men to bathe at the end of the day. They flocked to rivers and ponds in large numbers – irrespective of whether they could swim. In June 1583 alone, 11 men died by drowning in places ranging from Dorset to Northamptonshire, Somerset to Suffolk. In Maidstone, Thomas Carpenter was within sight of other young men in the millstream when he fell into a whirlpool, but they could not save him without endangering themselves. In the Thames, Martin Robinson buckled on two bladders to help him stay afloat at Paris Garden in Southwark, but the buckle broke and he perished.
Many workers died while washing sheep in preparation for shearing. This practice claimed two dozen victims – two-thirds of them in June and a quarter of them women – as panicking sheep knocked over the labourers or slipped out of their grasp and were chased into deeper water. Such deaths occurred in major rivers including the Avon, Calder, Great Ouse, Severn, Thames and Trent, but also in creeks, brooks and millstreams.
July
The hidden horrors of harvests and haystacks
Harvesting the hay from meadows and marshes in high summer, workers wielded extremely sharp scythes that they swung with force. Mowers walked in staggered lines to try to avoid slicing one another, but fatal accidents were not uncommon.
At Welford in Northamptonshire in 1559, Richard Goodall safely worked his way across Widow Symes’ field for four hours. He was then caught in the leg by Ralph Billinge’s scythe.
Troubles were not at an end when the hay was carted away, because haystacks were unstable, leading to misfortunes for those working on them. William Awdeley of Botolph Claydon, Buckinghamshire, aged over 60, fell off the “heye mowe” in his barn that he had climbed to “trede his heye” in 1555. This work was more typically undertaken by young women; one such was Jane Turney, who fell off a stack at Tidburst in Aldenham, Hertfordshire, and died in 1574.
Harvest-time also saw people playing various sports – forerunners of field athletics – many of which involved throwing things. Spectators were warned, but couldn’t always take evasive action. July brought mishaps with quoits in Berkshire in 1538, a pikestaff in Yorkshire in 1526, a plough coulter (blade) in Cumberland in 1564, and a sledgehammer in Dorset in 1591.
August
Carts, crops and pitchforks
August brought the grain harvest – and more dangers in the forms of reaping and carting, especially when workers made haste in the uncertain English weather. Jumping on and off carts to pile crops and rope them down often resulted in falls, cracked heads and broken necks or backs.
Snapping ropes took the lives of John Helder at Tuddenham, Suffolk in 1553; John Edmunds at Shoddesden, Hampshire in 1551; and John Stacye at Newbury, Berkshire in 1539. William Gybbys of Woodnesborough in Kent fell in 1551 while standing on slippery sheaves of wheat. John Cowper of Rodmersham, also in Kent, was dislodged by a sudden gust of wind and fell to his death.
At Plash in Elworthy, Somerset in 1580, John Selacke faced a different kind of problem when the lower of his two cartwheels “did sodainlye sincke so depe into the grownde” that the whole cart fell over and he was fatally injured.
Vehicles often crashed en route to the barn, where more perils lurked. Carts manoeuvring in tight spaces, crops piled in towering stacks and sharp-pronged pitchforks interacted alarmingly. In August 1579, for example, Richard Taylor climbed up to the “pytch hole” in Henry Boughtone’s barn at Pattishall in Northamptonshire, where the sheaves were pitched through from the carts to the stacks inside. The unfortunate labourer slipped and landed on a pitchfork propped by the wall. Wounded between the ribs on his left side, he died just over two days later.
September
Mellow fruitfulness – and falls
Most fruit and nuts ripen in September, when pickers – who ranged in status from labourers to gentlemen and included women, boys and girls – climbed trees, frequently falling to their deaths in the process. An apple tree branch broke as Hugh Pritfoote sat on it at Dewchurch, Herefordshire in 1578. Thomas Chapman came off his ladder as he picked apples at Borden in Kent in 1520. And Jane Acton fell out of a pear tree at Stanford-on-Teme, Worcestershire in 1586.
Maturing acorns attracted pig-farmers, who climbed oaks to knock down the nuts to fatten their swine. In September 1559, Thomas Way fell in the New Forest, and in September 1540 Ralph Colley’s quest for “okehornez” at Bakewell ended with his neck broken on a stone below the tree.
October
Perils of ploughing
The agricultural cycle began each October with ploughing. Draught animals – oxen on heavy clay soils, horses for easier ground – could be hard to handle: restive during harnessing, distracted by dogs, kicking out when whipped. And if anything went wrong, being run over by the ploughshare resulted in horrible (and often fatal) injuries. At Ledbury, Herefordshire in 1539, John Bradford’s thigh was cut down to the bone by the plough’s blade. And in East Sutton, Kent in 1578, Thomas Seman was wounded in the right side with a gash three inches (about 7.5cm) long, three inches wide and four inches (10cm) deep.
This month also saw one instance of a fate all too common year round. At Bramerton, Norfolk on 16 October 1579, a 19-year-old maidservant took “a payle” from her master’s house and headed for a pit on the common to collect water. The ground there was slippery, and she fell in and drowned. One in eight accidental deaths of women and girls over five years old was the result of such work – traipsing backwards and forwards to wells, ponds, rivers and streams day after day to keep households supplied with water. The thing that made the sad case of this ill-fated young woman notable was her famous namesake: she was Anne Bulleyn.
November
High drama on rooftops and bell-ropes
An ideal time for re-roofing buildings was November, when straw was abundant after harvest. Professional thatchers and handy householders alike clambered up with thatching needles and yelms – straightened bundles of straw. The dangers were many: ladders broke, thatchers slipped off roof beams, and springles – thin, flexible sticks used for pinning down thatch – could be treacherous. In 1564, one sprang back and hit Richard Hotchkis just below the right eye as he thatched Richard Askall’s house at Atcham in Shropshire. And when John Houson fell off his ladder at Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire in 1563, he landed on a springle that pierced his left side, penetrating 5 inches deep.
During the reign of Elizabeth I, bells were rung on 17 November to celebrate the anniversary of her accession to the throne in 1558. Curiously, bells comprised the main cause of accidental death at church – and three mishaps on that pivotal day reveal the various ways death could occur.
At York Minster in 1599, Robert Grymstone got the bell-rope caught between his legs, and was lifted high before being dropped on his head. At Cobham, Kent in 1592, a bell-rope snagged the bench on which John Robinson stood, hauling it 6 feet into the air; John slid off and down onto the paved church floor. At Beaumont, Essex in 1581, William Taylor found that neither the great bell nor the middle bell had ropes, so he climbed into the steeple to ring them on the headstock. He misjudged the swing of the middle bell, though, and his head, neck and shoulders were crushed between bell and frame.
December
Frosty falls and fatal festivities
Cold set in once more in December. Ice often caused accidents at watermills, where workers slipped into the millrace off frosty footbridges or fell while clearing encrusted waterwheels. It might also break under those who ventured out to hunt otters or to take short-cuts across frozen watercourses. It formed floes on rivers, too; in 1532, ice tipped over a ferry on the Wye at Bredwardine, resulting in the loss of all 10 passengers.
Christmas was, of course, a time for going to church, for celebrating, for feasting – and for accidents. Hurrying from church to the rectory in Croxton, Cambridgeshire on Christmas Day 1521, Robert Bakar fell into the parson’s pond and drowned. Jane Jenden tumbled off a table while hanging greenery in her home in 1562. And Jane Typtott stabbed herself in the leg while slaughtering her pig on Christmas Eve 1567.
Seasonal pastimes posed threats, too. Wrestling in the hall at Kneesall Rectory, Nottinghamshire in 1549, Thomas Bunting fell on Lawrence Mylner’s knife. And in Houghton, Hampshire in 1563, John Hypper crushed his testicles while “playinge Christenmas games” with his neighbours. Tudor life was rich in variety – and so was Tudor death.
Steven Gunn is professor of early modern history at Merton College, University of Oxford. Tomasz Gromelski is a researcher at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. Their new book is An Accidental History of Tudor England (John Murray)
This article was first published in the July 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
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