Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors

It’s the Wednesday after TudorCon and I’m finally coming up for air! I’m so excited to share Nathen Amin’s keynote with you. This was Nathen’s first ever talk in America, and it only took us six years to get him here.

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Long before anyone in England was hanged as a witch, ordinary women had a magic of their own. They wrapped parchment girdles covered in prayers around their bellies in labor. They borrowed holy relics from the parish like library books. They baked cakes in total silence on St Agnes’ Eve, hoping to dream of the man they’d marry. Nobody called them witches. It was just how you got through life.

In this audio episode, I follow what happened to that magic from the 1400s to the Pendle trials of 1612. You’ll meet Eleanor Cobham, who went to the Witch of Eye for help having a baby. There’s Ursula Kemp, the Essex cunning woman whose healing skills became the evidence against her. And there’s Old Demdike, who spent fifty years as the woman her neighbors went to for help. It’s the story of how the Reformation took away women’s protective magic, until the same skills that made a woman useful could get her hanged.

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This summer I travelled around the south of England staying in historic inns, and stop number three was the White Horse in Dorking, Surrey. There's been a building on this spot since at least 1278, when it belonged to the Knights Hospitaller, and it later became one of the big coaching inns on the road from London to Horsham.

We got there way too early to check in, so we played board games at Game N Play (a board game café AND a ukulele shop). Then I fell in love with St Martin's Church, spent far too long in Waterstones, and went for an evening walk toward Box Hill (Jane Austen's Emma picnic, Keats, and a major who was buried upside down on purpose). Along the way I found out about Dorking's five-toed chickens, its sandstone caves, and the Mayflower passenger who came from this very town. I also did a little Dickens myth-busting and had a very meta Lucy Worsley moment.

Next up: the Royal Forest in Epping Forest, right next to Elizabeth I's hunting lodge, and the best room of the whole trip. Book your rooms with the White Horse here: https://whitehorsedorking.com/

🎟 TudorCon 2026, October 23 to 25, Richmond VA (plus TudorCon From Home): https://tudorcon.englandcast.com

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🏨 The White Horse: https://whitehorsedorking.com/

🎲 Game N Play: https://game-n-play.co.uk/

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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 corporate takeover. Squeeze the leadership, take the board, cut off Rome, audit everything, find some dirt, close the small houses first, and then come for the big ones.

In this episode I walk through the whole playbook, from the 1531 fine on the clergy to the abbot of Glastonbury being dragged up the Tor in 1539. And I make the case for the people it was run on, the monks, nuns and friars who lost their homes, and the towns that lost their hospital, almshouse and biggest employer. (Full disclosure, I'm an Episcopalian, so this is me looking hard at the other side.)

TudorCon is October 23 to 25, and you can join from anywhere with TudorCon From Home. The main room is livestreamed and every talk is recorded: https://tudorcon.englandcast.com/tudorcon-from-home/

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What happened to the monks and nuns afterwards: https://www.englandcast.com/2025/04/dissolution-of-the-monasteries-2/

#HenryVIII #Tudors #DissolutionOfTheMonasteries #TudorHistory #ThomasCromwell

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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 Tudors got ready for the long dark, in their bodies, in their homes, and in their hearts.

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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, from a seventeen-year-old farm servant looking for next year's job all the way up to Queen Elizabeth watching sea gods row across a lake that was dug just for her.

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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 found: Thomas Tusser, a former choirboy and court musician who walked away from court, became a Suffolk farmer, and wrote an entire farming manual in rhyme.

We crash a harvest home celebration spotted near Windsor by a German traveller in 1598, follow the gleaners into the stubble and the pigs into the woods, and find out why "mast fats up swine, mast kills up kine." Then we spend time with the Tudor farmer's wife, who was winnowing corn, making malt, driving the plough, selling geese at market, and keeping the accounts. And there's a 1523 farming manual that tells husbands and wives to show each other their receipts!

This is episode 2 of 4 in our series on how the Tudors got ready for autumn. If you missed Michaelmas, start there. There's a goose in it.

🎟 TudorCon From Home, October 23 to 25. We livestream the main room all weekend, and every talk is recorded with audio and slides so you can listen afterward. Every ticket comes with a digital swag bag worth over $100. Sign up by September 30th to join the Privy Council and get the bonuses, including the Spooky Halloween Walk through London: https://tudorcon.englandcast.com/tudorcon-from-home/

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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 All Angels, was when rent came due, farm servants' contracts ran out, London chose its Lord Mayor, and the lawyers and students all headed back to town. It was also goose day, and the reason tenants turned up at the landlord's door with a goose under their arm is funnier (and a little sadder) than you'd think. This is episode 1 of a four-part series on how the Tudors got ready for autumn.
In this one:
🪽 Who St Michael was, and why he's weighing souls in English church doom paintings
🌧 The Wenhaston Doom, hidden under whitewash for 300 years until a rainstorm in 1892
🪿 George Gascoigne's poem about tenants buttering up their landlords "for fear their lease fly loose"
🏴‍☠️ Busting the myth that Elizabeth I started the Michaelmas goose after the Armada
📜 Why the British tax year still starts on April 6th, thanks to an old quarter day
🎟 TudorCon From Home, October 23 to 25. We livestream the main room all weekend, and every talk is recorded with audio and slides so you can catch up afterward. Every ticket comes with a digital swag bag worth over $100. Sign up by September 30th to join the Privy Council and get the bonuses, including the Spooky Halloween Walk through London: https://tudorcon.englandcast.com/tudorcon-from-home

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The rebellion is over in three weeks. Wat Tyler is dead, the charters are revoked, John Ball is executed, and by every measure that historians usually use, the Peasants' Revolt failed completely. Except that the tax that started it was never levied again in the same way for a hundred and thirty two years.

The next general poll tax in England comes in 1513, under Henry VIII, and even then the government moved carefully. For four generations, the memory of 1381 sat in the room every time Parliament talked about taxing ordinary people.

In this final part of the series we go to Smithfield on the 15th of June, 1381, and work out what actually happened between Wat Tyler and the fourteen year old king. Then we follow Richard II to Waltham, where the chronicler Thomas Walsingham puts a speech in his mouth that is quoted in almost every book on the revolt, and which one of the best modern historians of 1381 thinks was made up.

We go through the reprisals in Essex, Hertfordshire and Norfolk, and then we ask the question the whole series has been building toward. They lost. Did they also win? Serfdom in England is not abolished by an act of Parliament. It drains away. And in 1574, Elizabeth I signs a commission to free the last serfs on the crown estates, which tells you both that villeinage had almost disappeared and that it had not quite.

📅 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 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/

📬 My weekly newsletter: https://www.englandcast.com/newsletter-sign-up/

📅 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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