Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors

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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I got on a Zoom call with two Blue Badge guides from Context Travel, and by the end of it I had a list of about a dozen places in London I've never been and now desperately need to see.

Sean spent almost 30 years in financial services before deciding life was too short not to spend it obsessing over history and art instead.

Caroline taught history at a girls' school and specialized in Edward VI, the Tudor everyone skips past on the way from the six wives to Elizabeth I.

We talked about the pieces of Tudor London hiding in plain sight: a tennis court wall tucked behind Buckingham Palace, a portrait of Edward VI you can only see properly through a spy hole, a single rose that's been paid as rent since 1381, and why Henry VIII's waistband tells you basically his entire biography.

I've been doing this for over 15 years and I did not know most of this going in. Keep a notebook handy, you're going to end up with a list.

Context Travel does small private tours led by working historians (not flag tours!) all over London and beyond. Link to check them out: https://www.contexttravel.com/

TudorCon 2026 is October 23-25 in Richmond, VA. In-person tickets are almost gone (less than 10 left), or join virtually with TudorCon From Home: https://tudorcon.englandcast.com

Sign up for the newsletter: https://www.englandcast.com/newsletter-sign-up/

This video was made in partnership with Context Travel.
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