Tudor England: A History

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But we do tend to talk about the Tudors as though it’s all about this one dysfunctional royal family, and that it’s five people and their closest adherents. You know, we are looking at a country where there are thousands and thousands of people who just don’t figure in a lot of the kind of popular culture that revolves around the Tudors. So, yeah, there is a sort of concerted attempt by some of the upper echelons of society to deride Henry VII’s achievements. To deplore his reign and, you know, his style of kingship, which is deeply unfair. WOODING: Yes. I think, actually, the arguments that people have in this period, or the debates that they have about the role of women, are fascinating, and really confound a lot of the assumptions that… I mean, we just assume that early modern society is a patriarchal society, and that women were going to have the rough end of every deal. But the more you probe the way people are thinking and writing about gender and the relations between the sexes, the more you realize that there’s a huge diversity of views. There are people who, you know, will quite emphatically stand up for the education of women, and sometimes the sort of moral superiority of women. I do think one thing that set them apart though, is that even the wealthy in Tudor society quite often had a really powerful sense of social responsibility towards the poor. Something which I think, well, I think perhaps compares favorably with attitudes today. WOODING: Because this is the era of Renaissance and because everyone in Europe is preoccupied with the past—with the classical past and with the biblical past. in the 16th century, their idea of progress is not forward looking like ours might be today. I mean, nowadays, you know, we look forward to—I don’t know—colonizing Mars or finding a cure for cancer.

Tudor England: A History by Lucy Wooding | Goodreads

When Henry VII landed in a secluded bay in a far corner of Wales, it seemed inconceivable that this outsider could ever be king of England. Yet he and his descendants became some of England’s most unforgettable rulers, and gave their name to an age. The story of the Tudor monarchs is as astounding as it was unexpected, but it was not the only one unfolding between 1485 and 1603. There can never be a definitive history of Tudor England. The debates about religion, government and society still rage unabated as they have done for much of the past 500 years. I suppose, ignoring for a moment the Horrible Histories nature of the period, this is why the reigns of the Tudor monarchs continue to have such a hold over our imagination in a way that the Plantagenets and Stuarts do not.

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Gervase Rosser, ‘Going to the fraternity feast: Commensality and social relations in late medieval England’, JBS 33 (1994), 431. rounded up - it started off strong but was generally disappointing. Of course I understand how important religion was to Tudor England, from the big rituals to regional traditions and people's personal faith, but man did she just go on about it. Honestly, I think it could have been called 'Tudor England: Politics and Religion' and I would have at least been prepared for the sheer amount of Catholicism vs Protestantism.

Lucy Wooding on Tudor England Shakespeare Unlimited: Lucy Wooding on Tudor England

Now that we look more at the underbelly of society. Now that we look at what it’s like to live through these upheavals, we are more alive to the reluctance, I think, that many people felt about this new, quite contentious way of looking at religion. And a religion which did require a level of literacy and which deplored the kind of material sensory culture of pre-reformation religion, which, I think, made it hard to understand and assimilate for a lot of society. Now, we are looking at it from that perspective. We realize that the advance of Protestantism was a lot slower and more halting, and more reluctant than we ever thought. Lucy Wooding offers a new perspective on the period—a treasure chest of real people enduring war, poverty, chaos and contagion. Fascinating characters are crowded into a narrative of superb dramatic pace. Do we need yet another Tudor history? Yes, apparently we do.”— Times (UK), “Best History Books of 2022” I studied for both my degrees at Magdalen College, Oxford, before lecturing for two years at Queen’s University in Belfast. I was a lecturer at King’s College London between 1995 and 2016 and I joined Lincoln College, Oxford, in October 2016.

At the start of this period before the Reformation, you also have a way of looking at the world which sees sacrality. Which sees, you know, spiritual meaning and indeed spiritual power invested in material things. BOGAEV: It’s all fascinating stuff and you’d think that Henry’s—his tortured theology and these towering contradictions would be perfect fodder for Shakespeare. But his play doesn’t deal in any of that. I mean, he makes Henry VIII out to be a kind of a young, innocent, duped by evil Catholic Wolsey. So, his primary motivation is to fix his marital problems. He does need to get rid of Catherine because it becomes clear to him that their marriage is just not blessed by God, so he must have done something wrong. He is, I think, genuinely in love with Anne Boleyn. Who is, of course, a very fascinating creature herself, and is also a highly intellectual, highly educated, and very pious individual who’s interested in some of the same, humanist ideas about religion. There’s something for everyone. From award-winning theater and music, to poetry and exhibitions, experience the power of the arts with us. Become a Teacher Member Get full access to the latest resources and ongoing professional development

Tudor England: A history by Lucy Wooding | Book review - TLS Tudor England: A history by Lucy Wooding | Book review - TLS

It’s interesting that, you know, with Anne Boleyn, he’s already had an affair with her sister. So yeah, no surprises there. So, I don’t think seeing him as some kind of sexual predator is really at all appropriate. Now that we are questioning whether in fact there was that much Protestant commitment when she comes to the throne in 1553, we can look at her in a slightly different light and think, “Ah, okay. Well…” I mean, she herself always said that she was ruling over a largely Catholic population with a small vocal minority of Protestant troublemakers. Now, within a church that might be within a statue, within a holy relic, something like that, but out in the countryside, you also see holy wells and holy trees and sights associated with saints and pilgrimage ways. So, the landscape is overlaid with a sort of network of spiritual, you know, indicators. The story of the Tudor monarchs is as astounding as it was unexpected, but it was not the only one unfolding between 1485 and 1603. In cities, towns, and villages, families and communities lived their lives through times of great upheaval. In Tudor England: A History, Lucy Wooding lets their voices speak, exploring not just how monarchs ruled but also how men and women thought, wrote, lived, and died.WOODING: Yes. I don’t know whether the inequalities were quite as glaring as they are now in the modern world. J ust before Whitsunday in the summer of 1549, a fight broke out in the playground of a school in Bodmin. When the dust had settled and questions were asked, the authorities discovered that the children had divided into two gangs, or rather ‘two factions, the one whereof they called the old religion, the other the new’. In this, the children revealed themselves to be remarkably acute commentators on wider social developments. Not long after, on 9 June (Whitsunday itself), the government of Edward VI imposed the Book of Common Prayer on every parish church in England. The time-hallowed Latin mass was replaced with an English text. The West Country exploded with what’s known as the Prayer Book Rebellion, one of the greatest popular risings of the 16th century. ‘If there was a single point in time that separated the old world and the new,’ writes Lucy Wooding in her magnificent new survey of Tudor England, this was it. So sholde lewde men lerne by ymages”: Religious Imagery and Bible Learning’, in The English Bible in the Early Modern World, ed. R. Armstrong and T. Ó hAnnracháin (Brill, 2018) There are good grammar schools, many of which were founded in the late medieval period, and a great many more are founded in the 16th century. They do say that the proportion of grammar schools per head of population is not equaled again until, I think, the 19th century. Fasting was a regular part of Tudor life, both before and after the Reformation. In the pre-Reformation period, everyone abstained from meat and dairy on Wednesdays and Fridays, on the eve of important saints’ days, and throughout Advent and Lent. One of Protestantism’s attractions was that it dispensed with these requirements. However, the threat to the fishing trade was such that Friday fasting was hastily restored during Edward VI’s reign – although it remained unpopular, as the attempts to regulate butchers’ sales on fast days indicate. [35] In later Protestant culture, it became common to mark times of mourning, or special intercession, with fast days. Public fasts might be held in parish, town or by the nation at large in response to a particular crisis, whilst the godly might keep private fasts, accompanied by prayer and almsgiving, in pursuit of greater personal sanctity. [36] The response to the terrible famines of the 1590s, after three consecutive harvests had failed, was to declare public fasts on Wednesdays and Fridays – with the pious objective of showing penitence to a providential God for the sins that had merited such punishment, and with the practical objective of giving the food saved to the starving poor. The Council interpreted God’s displeasure as a response to the ‘excesse in dyett’ and ‘nedeles waste and ryotous consumpcion’ prevalent throughout the kingdom. [37] In more private fashion, many dedicated Protestants resumed the medieval practice of fasting the night before receiving communion. [38] Growing Vegetables to Feed the Poor