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/7f97cae4082d4972
Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/beyond-where-words-can-go-richard-smith/1148428273?ean=9780872334007
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Where-Words-Can-Go/dp/0872334007/

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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 anniversary, I wanted to tell you where I was that day. Then I want to take you back to another morning that started out completely normal: Paris, August 1572.

The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre began just days after a royal wedding that was supposed to bring peace. Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth's ambassador, was right in the middle of it. His pregnant wife and his little daughter were in the house, and a teenage Philip Sidney was sheltering with them while refugees came to his door.

We'll also follow the news back to England, including the refugees who landed at Rye, and look at how quickly grief turned into a demand for safety, both in 1572 and in 2001.

Take care of each other this week, and if you want to, tell me in the comments where you were.

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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 Catherine Howard on the day Thomas Cromwell was executed.

So I went looking for the English version of that book. There isn't one. And working out why turned into a much better episode than the one I set out to make.

The Tudors were obsessed with cards. Henry gambled at them constantly, and there's an entry in his own Privy Purse expenses recording him losing twenty crowns at a game called Pope Julius to "my lady Marques," which is Anne Boleyn, on the road home from Calais in November 1532. Possibly during their first week of marriage, if you believe Edward Hall.

But nobody was reading cards. Not tarot, which was a card game in Italy and never really crossed the Channel, and not ordinary playing cards either, at least not in any way we can evidence before the middle of the seventeenth century. Tarot divination was invented in 1781 by a French pastor who decided the deck was secretly ancient Egyptian, at a time when nobody alive could read a hieroglyph.

What Tudor England had instead was stranger and much more practical. Two acts of Parliament in the same session, one banning cards for labourers on the grounds that it was ruining English archery, the other making witchcraft a felony and naming as its chief targets treasure hunters and people who found your stolen property. A countrywide trade in divination using a sieve balanced on a pair of shears. And one Kentish gentleman who sat down to argue that witches weren't real and accidentally wrote the first book in English explaining how card tricks work.

Sponsor
This episode is sponsored by Context Travel, who took me round Hampton Court Palace this summer in a group of six with a guide who actually knows the historiography. The on-location video from that day is coming to the channel soon. contexttravel.com

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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 could count his money out there among the trees, and half the county seems to have known it.

What happened next is why we can still tell this story. The local justice of the peace, Sir John Gaynesford, was an old man who had no obligation to do any of this well, and he did it beautifully. He examined the body, checked for signs of suicide because a widow's survival depended on the answer, found a broken knife handle, took depositions from witnesses more than twenty years before the law required it, and eventually hauled his suspect in front of the Privy Council in Westminster. When that went nowhere, he wrote nine folio pages to Thomas Cromwell and told him he would rather leave the county than keep living like this.

And then the case vanishes from the record entirely.

This episode is about who Robert Grame was, what Gaynesford did, what probably happened to Anastasia Grame, and how much of the past is missing from the documents we have left.

Follow the show so the next one turns up on its own. The autumn collection is up at TudorFair.com, including Bonfires and Boleyns and Sweater Weather and Sovereigns.

Source: William B. Robison, "Murder at Crowhurst: A Case Study in Early Tudor Law Enforcement," Criminal Justice History. The underlying document is Gaynesford's report to Cromwell, State Papers 1/72/76-87, at The National Archives.

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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, sugar, musk, ambergris, and civet, boiled down softly for an entire day. I had no idea that existed until I sat down with Jen Siems of Immortal Perfumes, who has spent 14 years building fragrances out of archival research.

Jen is a self-taught perfumer and a former English teacher, which means she talks about rare book rooms the way most people talk about their favorite TV show. She also has Elizabeth's recipe, which includes marjoram for headaches and a truly unreasonable amount of sugar. If you know anything about Elizabeth's teeth, that tracks.

We get into:

• Where ambergris actually comes from, and why a kid walking on an English beach can stumble onto $50,000 worth of it

• Whether the Tudors really stank, and how much of that reputation we've made up

• Miasma theory, and why smelling magnificent was a health strategy and a PR strategy at the same time

• Catherine de' Medici, perfumed gloves, and how French perfume as we know it started with a Florentine bride

• Mary Queen of Scots' golden pomanders, and the violets-and-sparkling-wine legend that got misattributed to Anne Boleyn for years

• What Jude Law wore on the set of Firebrand to play a dying Henry, and why Alicia Vikander couldn't stand to be near him

Fair warning, Jen explains how civet gets harvested and it involves a comparison to taking your dog to the vet. I was not ready.

GIVEAWAY: Jen is giving away a vintage Avon Queen Elizabeth bottle (her torso lifts off, it's wonderful) filled with the Immortal Perfumes scent of the winner's choice. Enter here: https://www.englandcast.com/immortal-perfumes-giveaway/. Closes September 14, US shipping, 18+.

Find Jen: immortalperfumes.com | Immortal Perfumes on Instagram and TikTok | the Immortal Perfumes Substack

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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 down his own hedges, and led them to Norwich. What followed was seven weeks of about 16,000 people running the county from a camp on Mousehold Heath, with a court, a supply system and a signed list of demands. It ended at the Battle of Dussindale on 27 August 1549.This one has been on my list for seventeen years and I somehow never made it. Fixing that today.

Related video on Tudor Vagrancy laws that I mentioned:

https://youtu.be/q4Gku_0H_kg

📅 TASTE OF TUDORCON, THIS SATURDAY

Free online event, Saturday 29 August, 1pm ET, about two hours. Eight TudorCon speakers each share a piece of their talk: Henry VIII and head trauma, John Dee, the history of English, a dress that took seven years to make, and more. Drop in and out, and there's a replay if you can't make it live.

Register: https://tudorcon.englandcast.com/tasteoftudorcon2026/

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Join me for Taste of TudorCon, a free online preview of this year's conference, on August 29th: https://tudorcon.englandcast.com/tasteoftudorcon2026/

A skilled craftsman in early Tudor London earned sixpence for a day's work. I've been staring at that number for ages, because on its own it tells you nothing. Sixpence out of what? Buys what? Compared to whom?So I went digging, and it turns out if you follow that one coin up and down the Tudor social ladder you end up seeing the whole society. The housemaid on a pound a year. The brewer on ten. The king who spent thirty-six thousand pounds on an eighteen-day party in a field.

We get into the coins themselves, which have the best names in the world, including the gold angel that doubled as medicine.

We climb from the bottom of the ladder to the top. We work out what sixpence would actually buy you at a market stall. And then we get to 1544, when Henry VIII started secretly putting less silver in the coins, and everybody's wages stopped working.

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I just watched Nolan's Odyssey and went down a rabbit hole: did the Tudors even know this story? Turns out, not the way you'd think.

For most of the dynasty, England's version of the Trojan War came from a completely different, largely invented medieval tradition, one that literally cut the gods out of the story. The real, translated Homer didn't arrive in English until the dynasty was basically over.

In this one: two forged "eyewitness" accounts of the Trojan War, the first book ever printed in English, the Tudors' fake Trojan ancestor Brutus, Cambridge's Greek revival, and why not a single Tudor monarch ever got to read a finished English Homer.

Join me for Taste of TudorCon, a free online preview of this year's conference, on August 29th: https://tudorcon.englandcast.com/tasteoftudorcon2026/
Get the newsletter: https://www.englandcast.com/newsletter-sign-up/

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