How Women Lost Their Magic (Medieval Charms to the Pendle Witches)
Long before anyone in England was hanged as a witch, ordinary women had a magic of their own. They wrapped parchment girdles covered in pray...
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Society & Culture
Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors
Music, culture, the arts, maritime exploration - Renaissance England was an exciting place to be. So much happening! Breaks with Rome. Wars with France. And Scotland. And Spain! Twice a mont...
Episodes
20 of 654 episodes
I Stayed in a 700-Year-Old Coaching Inn Where Dickens (Maybe) Wrote Pickwick
This summer I travelled around the south of England staying in historic inns, and stop number three was the White Horse in Dorking, Surrey....
Henry VIII's Playbook for Taking Over the Church
Henry VIII didn't dismantle the Church in England. He took it over, one step at a time, and the plan looks an awful lot like a hostile corpo...
Melancholy, Mutton Candles and Banned Bells: How the Tudors Faced the Dark
By All Saints' Day in Tudor London, the sun was down by quarter past four. In the final episode of our autumn series, we find out how the Tu...
From Farm Servant to Queen: How Every Tudor Got Ready for Autumn
Every September, all of Tudor England was on the move. In episode 3 of our autumn series, we climb the social ladder one rung at a time, fro...
Thomas Tusser's Tudor To-Do List for Autumn (Written Entirely in Rhyme)
The harvest is in. Now what? In episode 2 of our autumn series, we head out into the Tudor village with the best guide I could possibly have...
Why Tudor Tenants Brought Their Landlord a Goose (Michaelmas Explained)
September 29th was one of the biggest days of the Tudor year, and most of us have never heard of it. Michaelmas, the feast of St Michael and...
The Peasants' Revolt Was Crushed. So Why Did England Never Tax Like That Again?
The rebellion is over in three weeks. Wat Tyler is dead, the charters are revoked, John Ball is executed, and by every measure that historia...
The Day the Rebels Walked Into the Tower of London | Peasants' Revolt Part 3
In two weeks in June 1381, English peasants drove a Chief Justice out of Essex, took Rochester Castle, walked into Canterbury Cathedral, cam...
Where Did All the Women Go? The Tax That Started the Peasants' Revolt | Part 2
In 1377, England counted about 1,355,000 adults for a new poll tax. In 1381 it counted again and found about 896,000. There was no great pla...
How Rain, Dead Cows and the Black Death Started the Peasants' Revolt
In June 1381, rebels broke into John of Gaunt's Savoy Palace, the wealthiest house in England. They smashed the gold plate, crushed the jewe...
What the Tudors Did When They Couldn't Control Anything
Every year in Tudor England, the weather warmed up and people wondered if this would be a plague year. On top of plague there was the sweati...
The Monks Henry VIII Left Behind, Told in 200 Sonnets
What happens to your whole world when the king decides your faith is wrong? Richard Smith's new book, Beyond Where Words Can Go, follows two...
They Tried to Demolish Hampton Court. Then the Queen Died.
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Where Were You on 9/11? Walsingham in Paris, 1572
Twenty-five years ago today, I was at my desk in Soho, emailing my friends about Thanksgiving plans, when one of them told me to open Yahoo...
Henry VIII Lost at Cards to Anne Boleyn. It's in His Own Accounts.
In 1540, a printer in Venice published a beautiful, enormous book that let you tell your fortune with a deck of cards. The same year Henry V...
Murder at Crowhurst: A Tudor Cold Case
In August 1532 a charcoal burner named Robert Grame was murdered in a wood in Surrey. He worked alone, he carried a checkered board so he co...
There's a Written Recipe for Henry VIII's Perfume
There is a written recipe for Henry VIII's perfume. It's in a 1608 book called A Closet for Ladies and Gentlewomen, and it's rosewater, suga...
The Rebellion That Started Because a Lawyer Paid a Bribe
In July 1549, a crowd in Norfolk showed up to tear down Robert Kett's fences. Instead of stopping them, he agreed with them, helped pull dow...
What Things Actually Cost in Tudor England
Join me for Taste of TudorCon, a free online preview of this year's conference, on August 29th: https://tudorcon.englandcast.com/tasteoftudo...