Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors22 Jul

How the Tudors Decided Who Deserved to Eat

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 They repealed it in two years.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

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Episoder(646)

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, camped outside London, burned the richest palace in the country...

23 Sep 20min

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 plague, no famine and no invasion. So where did a third of the ...

22 Sep 24min

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 jewels with hammers and threw the silver in the Thames. Accordin...

21 Sep 25min

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 sweating sickness, which could kill you between dinner and supper,...

18 Sep 28min

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 young Benedictine monks, a lord's youngest son and a foundl...

16 Sep 46min

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

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14 Sep 11min

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 because something big was happening in New York. For the ann...

11 Sep 11min

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 VIII married Anne of Cleves, annulled it, and married Catheri...

11 Sep 35min