Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors

In early June in Tudor England, one woman was already up before sunrise. She had roughly four months to produce everything her household needed to survive the next twelve months. Medicine. Preserves. Cosmetics. Cleaning products. The entire household pharmacy. All of it, from scratch, while the plants were available.

She had no name in the history books. But without her, the household didn't make it through winter.

We follow a Tudor stillroom mistress through a day at the start of summer, from the early morning herb harvest before the dew burns off, through the hours of distilling rose water and filling the medicine chest, all the way to the evening ledger by candlelight. Along the way we get into the dissolution of the monasteries and why it made her job dramatically higher stakes, the cosmetics she was producing that were slowly poisoning the people she was trying to care for.
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In 1293, King Edward I finally got what he wanted: the Isle of Wight. He'd been trying to take it for decades. He had to wait until its owner, Isabella de Fortibus, was on her deathbed to get it. And even then, she made him pay for it.

Isabella de Fortibus was a 13th century countess who became one of the wealthiest people in England after a series of family tragedies left her controlling Devon, the Aumale estates in Yorkshire, and the strategically crucial Isle of Wight. Two kings, Henry III and Edward I, spent years trying to force her to remarry and hand over her lands. She said no. Repeatedly. Legally. One suitor actually tried to abduct her, and she bribed a prior and fled to Wales to escape him.

She also owned her own personal copy of the statutes of the realm. In the 13th century. A laywoman. And she used it to win dozens of legal battles protecting what was hers.

I found Isabella in Medieval Horizons by Ian Mortimer -highly recommend it if you love this kind of deep dive into the medieval world.
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It's Memorial Day, and I've been thinking about patriotism -- where it comes from, why people feel it so strongly, and whether Tudor people felt anything like it at all.

The answer is more interesting than I expected. In 1485, when Henry VII takes the throne after the Battle of Bosworth Field, England is basically a collection of feudal relationships. Loyalty runs to your lord, your family, your region -- not to some abstract idea of "England."

There's no standing army, no national church, no real sense of a shared national identity.

And then the Reformation happens. And everything changes.
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London, summer 1563. The city sounds wrong. The market stalls have gaps. And then you notice the door across the street — a blue cross painted on it, and a man standing outside who wasn't there yesterday.

The plague is back.

Today we're going street level into the Tudor plague years. What it actually felt like to live in London when the epidemics hit, what ordinary people did to survive, and three specific summers — 1563, 1593, and 1603 — that each killed somewhere between one in eight and one in three Londoners.

We also get into what the Tudor government actually did about it (more sophisticated than you'd think), the plague doctors and their beaked masks, the quacks selling dried toads and unicorn horn, and the parish searchers — older women whose job was to examine bodies and determine cause of death, and who are almost entirely invisible in the historical record.

Oh, and Elizabeth I had a gallows erected at Windsor to hang anyone who followed her from London. Very her.

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Someone in the comments asked me to do a deep dive on whether Elizabeth I actually gave the order for Mary Queen of Scots' execution. And the closer I looked, the stranger it got.

Here's the surface version. Mary was Elizabeth's prisoner for nineteen years. Elizabeth kept refusing to sign the death warrant. Then one day she signed it. Then said she didn't mean it. Then threw her secretary William Davison in the Tower for sending it. And Mary lost her head anyway.

The real version involves a beer barrel, a forged postscript, a council that may or may not have acted behind the queen's back, and a secretary who somehow kept his salary the entire time he was imprisoned for treason.
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