Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors

What did it actually take to keep Tudor England clean? Before dawn, before the court woke up, before Henry VIII put on his famous doublet, someone was already up to her elbows in lye, urine, and other people's laundry. That someone was the Tudor laundress, and her story is one I have been wanting to tell for a long time.

In this episode we follow three very different women doing the same essential work: the royal laundress at Hampton Court, who washed the king's most intimate linen and had to pretend she knew absolutely nothing about what those sheets revealed; the household laundress in a noble family, including the remarkable story of Bess Holland, who went from washer in the nursery to mistress of the Duke of Norfolk; and the independent washerwoman working on her own, building a business in a world that viewed her very existence with suspicion.

Plus: the Tudor hygiene experiment that will completely change how you think about cleanliness, the Flemish refugee who arrived in London and built an empire out of a bucket of starch, and why the most fashionable accessory in Elizabethan England was basically a laundress's worst nightmare.
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Everything we think we know about women and power in the medieval world is missing a few key details. Like the fact that there were exactly two female sheriffs in medieval England, and that their lives were directly tangled together in the most dramatic way possible.

Nicholaa de la Haye held Lincoln Castle through multiple sieges, was appointed Sheriff of Lincolnshire by King John in one of his final acts, and helped turn the tide of a French invasion in 1217, all while in her sixties. A French chronicler called her "a very cunning, bad-hearted and vigorous old woman." She won anyway.

Ela of Salisbury inherited one of the greatest titles in England at age nine, used a clause from Magna Carta to refuse remarriage, paid the king to serve as Sheriff of Wiltshire, showed up at the exchequer in person to do the job, and eventually founded Lacock Abbey before becoming its Abbess.

Oh, and their husbands knew each other. Ela's husband is literally the man who tried to steal Nicholaa's castle.

The history of women doing so-called men's work is not a modern story. It's just a story we haven't been told loudly enough.

Katherine Fenkyll episode I linked to at the end:

https://youtu.be/QggqaYpPbe4
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What if Thomas More had just signed the Oath of Supremacy? He could have. Plenty of people did. Cranmer signed it. Cromwell signed it. So why didn't More, and what would have changed if he had?

In this week's What If Thought Experiment, we're looking at one of the Tudor period's most interesting counterfactuals.

Henry VIII didn't need More's signature legally, he wanted it because More was the gold standard of European humanist credibility. Getting More to sign meant something. And More refused to give him that.

We talk about what a living More might have meant for the trajectory of the English Reformation, whether Mary I's reign might have looked different without the brutal martyrdoms of the 1530s setting the tone, and the woman at the center of it all: Margaret Roper, who bribed a guard, lied to the King's Council, and was buried holding her father's pickled head nine years later.

I have complicated feelings about Thomas More. Come have them with me.

🔗 Links mentioned:My Katherine of Aragon video, where I talk about similar frustrations: https://youtu.be/WDF3Cs3P3IY

More What If Thought Experiments: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyxR5N2MPwbxZEmGg22jn-da5cpCIJ2Qt
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Before it was an insult, "spinster" was a job title. It meant a woman who spins thread. It appeared in tax rolls, court records, and legal documents. It was an occupation. And then the economy collapsed, the guilds shut women out, and the word became something else entirely.

In this episode we're looking at the women who quite literally kept Tudor England running -- the spinners, weavers, and dyers whose labor underpinned the most important industry in the country. We're talking about the guild system that excluded them from legal protections while depending entirely on their work, the enclosure crisis that pulled the floor out from under their livelihoods, and the Statute of Artificers that gave magistrates the power to imprison women who weren't working hard enough.
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You think office politics are bad? Imagine your entire career depending on whether the queen liked how you handed her a towel.Lady in waiting sounds like a decorative job. It wasn't. The women of the Tudor privy chamber controlled physical access to the most powerful person in England, and in Tudor political life, controlling the door meant controlling everything. A quiet word at the right moment, a letter passed along or strategically delayed, an introduction made or withheld. These women were intelligence assets, political operators, and the invisible machinery behind some of the biggest decisions of the era.

Today we're going inside the system: the org chart nobody wrote down but everyone understood, the dramatic power shift that happened when the privy chamber went from Henry VIII's court to the queens regnant, and what happened to the women who got it spectacularly wrong. Including Lady Katherine Grey, who secretly married a man with no royal permission and triggered a political crisis that landed multiple people in the Tower. And Lettice Knollys, who married Elizabeth I's favorite and was reportedly told there was but one sun in the sky and one queen in England.

And then there's Blanche Parry, who had been with Elizabeth since she rocked her cradle, and who figured out the only blueprint that actually worked: be so indispensable that removing you was unthinkable.If you want to go deeper, pick up Nicola Clark's The Waiting Game, which is linked below. It's fantastic.

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