Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors

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, and then walked into the Tower of London and beheaded the Archbishop of Canterbury. And a fourteen-year-old king rode out to meet them and said yes to everything they asked for.

This is Part 3 of my series on the Peasants' Revolt, told day by day, from Brentwood on 30 May to the night of 14 June with the rebels holding London. We cover Wat Tyler, who has no history at all before that month, John Ball's sermon at Blackheath, the manor court rolls they burned everywhere they went, the Flemish weavers murdered in the streets, and Johanna Ferrour, the woman the court records name as a leader of the attack on the Tower.

▶️ Part 1: https://youtu.be/bl5z1blEY-Y | Part 2: https://youtu.be/AT5AWrkIBVE

🔔 Subscribe for Part 4, the aftermath, which is where this story really gets you.

✈️ This episode is sponsored by Context Travel, who run small group and private tours led by scholars and local experts. I took their Hampton Court tour this summer, and my video about it is here: https://youtu.be/V9iXh7Eask4. Book a tour: https://www.contexttravel.com/

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📅 TudorCon From Home, October 23 to 25: join the Privy Council by September 30 for bonus game nights, early community access, the Spooky Halloween Walk through London audio tour, and 25% off with code PRIVYCOUNCIL.

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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 country go?

They were at home. Village after village sent in tax lists with far more men than women, because families had simply stopped telling the government their daughters, sisters and widowed mothers existed.

In Part 2 of my series on the Peasants' Revolt, I look at the 30 years that pushed England to breaking point. We cover the labour laws that fined workers to lower their bosses' taxes, a law telling ploughmen what they could wear, villagers who paid for copies of the Domesday Book to prove they were free, a ten-year-old king, and a poll tax that charged the poorest family the same per head as the richest. It all ends at Brentwood on 30 May 1381, when the people of Fobbing threw the tax commissioner out of town.

📅 TudorCon From Home, October 23 to 25: join the Privy Council by September 30 for bonus game nights, early community access, the Spooky Halloween Walk through London audio tour, and 25% off with code PRIVYCOUNCIL.
👉 https://tudorcon.englandcast.com/tudorcon-from-home/
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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. According to one chronicler, when a man was caught stealing, his own side threw him into the fire.So how do ordinary villagers get to that point?

In Part 1 of a four-part series on the Peasants' Revolt, I go back to the beginning. That means the rain of 1315, a famine so bad the king couldn't buy bread, a cattle plague that took the milk away from a whole generation of children, the Black Death, and a government that responded by making it illegal to ask for a raise.
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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, plus a flu pandemic and years of failed harvests when bread prices tripled. So how did ordinary people live with that constant hum of "something terrible might happen"?

In this episode we go outbreak by outbreak, from the first sweat in 1485 to the plague that greeted James I in 1603, and ask how people coped at every stop. We meet the Brandon boys, two teenage dukes of Suffolk who died of the sweat on the same morning in 1551, and their mother Katherine Willoughby, trying to make sense of it through her new Protestant faith. We look at what people lost when the Reformation took away purgatory, plague saints and prayers for the dead, right while the plague kept coming. And we meet Bartholomew Steer, who planned a rising in the hungry 1590s and had four men show up.

I made this one because so many of us are feeling a low hum of dread about big things we can't control right now. The Tudors don't have all the answers, but they have some surprisingly useful ones, and a bit of plague comedy too.

Also join the Privy Council for TudorCon From Home. Stream TudorCon, October 23 to 25, from your couch for $59, with a Digital Swag Bag worth over $100. Sign up by September 30 to join the Privy Council and get the brand new Spooky Halloween Walk through London immersive audio as a bonus, along with an extra game night, Tudor Zoom backgrounds and your Privy Council badge. Use code PRIVYCOUNCIL to save an additional 25%.
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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 foundling left on the monastery doorstep, through Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries and all the back and forth of the English Reformation. And it's told entirely in sonnets. Two hundred of them!

Richard is a clinical psychologist in Washington, DC who started writing sonnets for his dog (yes, really), and I loved talking with him about what it felt like to live inside the old faith, where the monks went when their homes were pulled down, and why the sonnet turned out to be the perfect way to tell this story. Our friend Gerry joined us live with some great questions about the manuscripts lost when the monasteries fell.

Find Richard at richardsmithwriting.com and on Instagram @richardsmithwriting.

Get Beyond Where Words Can Go:Bauhan Publishing: https://bauhanpublishing.com/shop/beyond-where-words/Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/p/books/beyond-where-words-can-go-a-novel-in-200-sonnets-richard-smith/7f97cae4082d4972Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/beyond-where-words-can-go-richard-smith/1148428273?ean=9780872334007Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Where-Words-Can-Go/dp/0872334007/
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